Princeton's 'Facilities' Will Offer Long-Range Alternative to Clubs

A walk down Prospect Street is the pleasantest excursion at Princeton. Down a broad, tree-pillared avenue, with great and handsome residences on either side, substantial edifices of stone and brick and leaded glass--the clubs. You can float down Prospect in a Fitzgeraldian dream, the wealth of accomplished architecture styles deluding you into the past. But up and around the corner, on a busier street, sets a building simple as reality, and as unavoidable as 1959. That is Prospect Club, its name a wistful mark of its exclusion. Prospect has always been the poor club, the wonk co-op club without servants, but last year it held an open bicker so that the University might have a hundred per cent club membership, Prospect became the catalyst in a big change--the biggest in seventy-five years--in the Princeton formula. After Prospect threw itself open to all bids, a group of either contemptous or indignant sophomores refused to bicker at all, at Prospect or anywhere else.

Since this group would soon be upperclassman and would require a place to take their meals and socialize, the University had to get up something for them. The best the deans could do was partition off part of the freshman commons and clean out some old game-rooms upstairs for them. This was something like blocking off the small dining room at the Union and airing out some of the little rooms with port-hole windows on the second floor. This scrounged combination was proclaimed with bland irony by the administration, "Wilson Lodge." (Woodrow Wilson always hated the clubs.)

These men were only the seeds of a contingent the Administration knew would grow with the years, which had been blown in on the wind of the G. I. bill and serious-minded veteran students ever since the war. Even under President Dodds' regime there was an insistent thought, at the backs of many minds, of an 'alternate facility' for those men at Princeton who do not want to be in clubs.

By this July ground will be broken for the first two hundred man unit of the planned six hundred man quad of the 'facility.' Clearly this facility is intended to be more than just a hopper or malcontents. The facility is meant to be a genuine alternative situation to club living, and it looks mighty like a house.

The quad will be built at a little distance from the dormitories, and a good walk from the clubs. The first two-hundred man unit will house students and tutors together, a 5,000 to 10,000 volume library, common rooms and a dining hall--all in the same building. The later two units will be linked onto the central building.

Unfortunately the distinctive neogothic of other campus buildings cannot be carried through in the new dorms, for the same monetary reasons that Quincy House is modern. The new structure will be built on sloping ground, three stories high at the lower end and two stories at the upper end. Construction techniques have not been decided on yet, but extensive use of steel or alumium, and glass, is being considered.

The quad will come off a little better, and a little worse, than Quincy in internal layout. The facility will be designed in the entry system, with a single study connecting three or four bedrooms. The quad will have nothing smaller than triples for undergraduates.

The first inhabitants will be of three different kinds: non-club upperclassmen, club upperclassmen interested only in the living quarters who must pay cash for meals in the dining hall, and a complement of sophomores to make use of the 250-man dining hall.

The whole grouping of biuldings will cost about seven million dollars; the price of the first section, which includes the dining hall and library, will be around four million.

Money is the big problem now. Alumni have money to give but they hold back, first of all because the majority of them don't want any alternative to the club system, no matter how "meaningful" President Goheen says it is; secondly, potential contributors who are interested don't like the idea that the plans for the quad are a major step out of the 'Princeton pattern,' which they consider unquie and worthy of being preserved.

For these two reasons, the administration softpedals the big changes and insists that the propsed living units are not copied from Cambridge or New Haven, but are distincively Princetonian.

"The proposed new quadrangle differs sharply on a number of counts from the Houses," President Goheen said. "For instance, the resident faculty will have neither curricular nor disciplinary responsibility for the resident students; nor will the social life of the residents be nearly as much self-contained."

Of course these differences, in Harvard practice, are no differences; more often than not one's tutor is outside one's House, and the role of disciplinarian generally ends with the proctor.

President Goheen gave some reasons in defense of the radical plan of sophomore inclusion for meals and recreation. He observed that, by including them "you reduce the isolation non-club upperclassmen might feel if the only other residents were club upperclassmen; you insure a more representative cross-section of interests and reduce the possibility of the social-dining facilities becoming a haven for any one group; you expose potential new members in the sophomore class to the possibilities inherent in the quadrangle and increase the chances for building a voluntary and satisfied upperclass membership."

The intention of all this, Goheen observed, is to "provide the advantage of a closed interconnection between social and academic life than now often pertains." Princeton should also furnish "social and dining arrangements in close relation to living quarters.' Which is a pretty good pocket description of the House system.

The reasons for and advantages of the House system are submerged and taken for granted in Cambridge, but in Princeton there is genuine need to bring together the social and academic life, or rather to bring some academic life into the social world. And because of the clubs, it appears desirable to bring closer together also the dining hall and the bedroom.

Anthony Neville, in an article in the Princeton Alumni Bulletin has described it well:

Rather than complement the intellectual life of the campus, the club system competes with it. Siren-like, it woos and charms even the best students to the beguiling pleasures of good clubmanship. And the standards for the good clubman are not the standards for the good student.

It is the University's idea to compete with the clubs on their own grounds and make the quads so attractive to the entering sophomores that they will decide against entering a club and live in the facility for three years. Besides the issues of architectural beauty and the tradition of gentility which the clubs possess, there is the important issue at Princeton of the entertainment of lady guests. Nearly all the clubs have elegant dining rooms and the appropriate ballrooms, sitting rooms and sun decks, and their top floors are a kind of of female dormitory with thirty or forty beds for putting up girls over the big football and spring weekends.

Princeton has a lot of troubles, and when the facility becomes a substantial wedge into the foundations of the club system, it will have a lot more of them. But perhaps these troubles and Princeton's awareness of them are a good sign, an indication that Princeton is growing up. The appearance of Princeton as a perpetual country club even now is beginning to dissolve. With academic standards higher and admissions policies changed as they have been, especially since the War, to grant entrance more on personal and intellectual qualities and less on family precedent, perhaps Tiger Town will grow into its responsibilities as an intelligent college community. It's sad in a way to see a boy grow into a man, especially when one knows the faults of a very old man like Cambridge, but the spirit and harshness of youth are better looked back upon than suffered through