THE TIGER'S CLUBS

The problem of undergraduate clubs, a moving one two years ago when the Student Council considered the problem, has since diminished in importance. Harvard club growth has been in the direction of lessening the importance of the club as a social factor. The club that is little more than a dining place has come into being. The rising tide of study, symbolized in such ninth wave as the interest in the English literature contest and the success of the Reading Period, has overwhelmed the playboy except in that brief period between September and October of the Freshman year and club life in the old people, has largely disappeared when it threatened to take the time of the one outside activity that most men are able to sustain.

The report of the writer for the Princeton Alumni magazine, who unencouraged by the argument surfeited Princeton undergraduate, prepared a lengthy, careful, statistical survey of the Princeton club is interesting in its tentative recommendations, which are elsewhere printed on this page. The assisement which has preceded them is notable for its more than superficial resemblance to the similar evaluations made by the Harvard Student Council. The assets are: (1) The clubs at present afford the only solution for feeding the upperclassmen. (2) Social advantages (3) Their innocuous position in student politics and activities; the liabilities are: (1) Failure to feed the 25 percent who are not elected. (2) Irresponsibility in matters of expense (3) Loss of time during the period of bidding (4) Cliques of preparatory school groups, "with little reference to the intellectual" as a standard of entrance.

The apathy and even boredom that the Princeton undergraduate finds in his own problem, conceived alumni style, is completely natural. Nowhere does one find the affairs of the University discussed with that sure freedom that is found at the dinner of the alumnus who is ten years out from Sever Quadrangle. Improvement, planful aspiration, avowed democratic principle--all these have a way ofturning will-o'-the wisp when the builders of the report, who are either too safely ensconced in the best clubs to care about action, or are alumni like the Princeton investigator, decide quite humanly to let it go at that. Changes in any club system seem to be a matter of maturaration within the clubs themselves, rather than any yet discovered surgery.