Princeton Bicker Period Opens As 39 Choose 'Alternate Facility'

PRINCETON, N.J.--Bicker, the annual eating club selection period, began last Wednesday, with the Princeton community anxiously hoping to avoid a repetition of last winter's fiasco.

Representatives of the seventeen undergraduate eating clubs started calling on 689 sophomores in their rooms Wednesday evening and will continue the process until next Friday. Thirty-nine members of the class have already chosen not to Bicker and have joined Woodrow Wilson Lodge, the "alternate facility" provided by the University.

The club Bicker committees will meet throughout the ten-day period, paring down their lists of prospective members, and will issue two types of bids early this week. A first-line bid entitles the sophomore to membership if he chooses to sign up; a second-line bid in effect puts him on a waiting list until those with first-line bids have either withdrawn or joined.

Last year, on Open House night, the last stage of Bicker, 23 sophomores did not receive bids, and refused to join Prospect Club, a co-operative organization that accepted any interested student. Of the 23, fifteen were Jewish, and several sources charged religious discrimination. Most of these "hundred percenters" have since joined either Prospect or the Wilson Lodge.

Prospect Non-Selective

Prospect is again holding an open, non-selective Bicker, but new members must sign the club's book before 9:15 p.m. on Open House night. According to the Interclub Committee's definition, a "hundred percenter" this year will be any sophomore who has not received a bid and has not joined Prospect by 10 p.m. next Saturday, Open House night.

President Robert F. Goheen, in an open letter to The Daily Princetonian last Thursday, said that the "club elections...are only a fraction of life at Princeton." Observers in Princeton hope that this official endorsement de-emphasizing Bicker, plus the emergence of Wilson Lodge as an attractive alternative to the club system, will promote a more successful Bicker. There are, however "too many variables" inherent in the process, they note, to predict what will happen later this week.