100 Per Cent on Prospect St.

On February 21, 1958, The Crimson ran a lengthy investigative article on "Bicker," the club-selection process at Princeton that smacked of the worst of elitism. Twenty-some years later, Bicker is still alive, although the years have eroded some of its worst offenses. Following are excerpts from "The Quest at Princeton for the Cocktail Soul," by John E. McNees '60, and an update on the system by Elizabeth W. McCarthy.

"Now I know you guys at Harvard put an emphasis on individualism and that's fine," he said, refusing to acknowledge my deprecatory gesture and attempt to interrupt. "But down here we like a less impersonal way of living so you like and can be with who you want for your friends and choose the guys you eat with."

A cold wind swept over the thick dark grass outside, whistled through the moonlit Gothic stonework, the parapets, battlements, and pinnacles intricately crowning the buildings with medieval bulk and solemnity.

And through the windows glaring orange out of a hundred majestic black bastions, the committees are seen as they come calling, catching sophomores just accidently attired from top to toe in immaculate tweeds, and Exeter yearbooks displayed with casual prominence.

"Hello, we're from Cottage."

"Come right on in," and an inchoate cordial babble of welcome as they all heartily seat themselves, and suddenly find a terrifying silence left standing.

"Uh, that looks like an old Currier and Ives you've got up there" [the walls, they always start with what you've got hanging on the walls, or with what you're majoring in or what you did last summer or where you're from--but avoid that one, there's danger there.]

And so it goes for ten or fifteen minutes. Total strangers confronting total strangers, making nervous small talk with artificial poise, watching through narrow eyes for the wrong color of socks, a grammatical slip or affectation, a pun or wisecrack in questionable taste. Then:

"Well, we really must be running along. A lot of men to see tonight you know."

"Well, we've certainly enjoyed chatting with you."

Smiling and nodding and handshaking them out the door, then turning to roommates with dread or accusations; and outside in the hall, the committees rating personalities on a grading system from one to seven (except for Ivy, the top, which needs only a plus or minus)--one even reporting the decision, incredibly enough, on a walkie-talkie:

"This is Pete calling in for Cottage. Negative on wonks in Patton 96. Dirty story, grubby room. That's right: negative."

It's a two-dollar, one-hour train ride from Princeton, New Jersey, to either Philadelphia or New York City. The nearest thing to a girl's college for miles around is the public high school, and there are only three theaters in the entire town. When seeking relief from the academic life, therefore, the average Princeton man invariably turns to his club. There he not only takes all his meals, but forms friendships, watches television, plays squash or bridge or Ping-Pong, drinks, parties, holds bull sessions, and even studies. Unless he's on a varsity team, its intramural program is his only athletic outlet, and when he becomes an alumnus, its activities will form the foci for fond memories, homecoming weekends, and pleas for financial support. More than any other part of the campus, it is the center of his life at Princeton.

"Bicker" is the annual process by which sophomores are chosen for election to the unproctered, privately owned and operated eating clubs. The college newspaper calls it "the most important single value-forming experience of the average undergraduate's career at Princeton."

The object of Bicker, according to a booklet published by the clubs themselves ("Now That You are Eligible"), is to discover "personableness in the individual" and "congeniality of the total, section." It is a method for assuring each club that any student to whom it offers a bid is of the "club type."

Immediately after finals--this year on Thursday, January 30, the Bicker committees of the clubs start to make their calls. These calls continue for ten days. Classes resume not long after Bicker has started, but they are largely ignored, sophomores finding it "hard to read anything more advanced than Peyton Place."

The committees call between the hours of four and six in the afternoon at first, then between seven-thirty in the evening and midnight. On the basis of a few minutes of stereotyped small talk the committees rate the eligibles, and the cubs immediately begin cutting their lists, most "from the top" as well as "from the bottom." Each night fewer clubs come calling at a given room. If, on the last night of the Bicker period, a sophomore is still receiving a committee, he has probably procured a "first-list bid." If not, and he has good friends whom a certain club, is anxious to have, he may receive a "second-list bid" that will get him in if they accept their first-list bids, or if not enough first-list men accept that club's bids to fill its "section." Some sophomores receive bids from a number of clubs. Others receive none at all....

Bicker reaches its colorful climax during Open House.

Seven-thirty that Saturday evening and the entire class, bathed, brushed, shined, combed, and shivering, hurries through the dark night and biting wind across the campus to Prospect Street, where the grounds of 16 plush clubhouses--and the not-so-plush Prospect Cooperative Club--stretch before them. The luckiest ones have received several bids and join one of the big five:

You stroll with anxious expectation across the broad lawn up to the great white columns of Colonial's porch. The door swings open and you and your group (throughout Bicker, you move in a group of three or four--you are judged, accepted, and perhaps rejected collectively) are swept into the dazzling warm uproar inside. You feel the soft depth of the rug beneath your feet and can see a bright, glittering, well-groomed haze all around you. Up the grand stairway, lined with upperclassmen clapping and cheering, until you reach the top where beaming and blushing abashedly you sign your name and receive the dark blue and red and yellow and green striped club tie from the president. A final huzzah, then you and the rest turn with relish to the serious business of the evening, consuming as much alcohol as possible. Everyone is shaking hands and slapping each other on the back. It is a bacchanilian love-feast and you drink freely. You are in.

Others, the majority, must accept bids to lesser clubs, and others still must go through the agonizing process of rushing from house to house, hoping to be accepted from the second list after all their more desirable classmates have signed the books. When at last these too are in, they drink still more freely and shout more loudly--trying to forget, though they are in, how it was they got there.

And finally there are the Others--those who are "in trouble," as the euphemism goes, who must somehow be fitted in somewhere by somebody so the clubs can again point with pride to the precious statistic 100 percent--"100 percent of those wishing to join a club did so"--the number by which alone the system can be justified. It must be able to claim the fact of 100 percent no matter how often or how strangely 100 percent must be redefined.

A council of the club presidents, the ICC [Interclub Committee], directs all 100 percenters to report to the back porch of Ivy at 9:30 sharp (oh heavy irony here, on the back porch of Ivy, entering not the front door or being admitted to the parlor, but stumbling through the dark around the carousing house, and coming through the servants' entry.)

At first they joke about their predicament (but actual tears will be shed before many hours have passed)--"I'd feel pretty bad if I didn't see so many of my friends here." Kind soft-spoken Ivy men take them aside and counsel them. Join Prospect, they gently urge (each adjusting his identical green and yellow striped tie). Join the poverty-stricken cooperative where you'll take turns waiting on your own tables and mopping the floor and be looked down upon for three years by the members of the real clubs. Join the wonk club, join the club for leftovers, and (ever so gently) hurry up about it, so we can show 100 percent and go back to the party. Resistance is firm, but in many cases gives way. Something in you resists being classified a wonk, but something deeper cries out against exile.

What constitutes the Princeton definition of "wonk" at Bickertime? The traits of a varied species can be most clearly grasped when combined into an extreme, idealized archetype, whose full obnoxious character each empirical individual but partially manifests and only for a brief time. To apprehend the Platonic essence, then, of the utter antithesis to the approved club type, imagine an inarticulate, introverted, morbidly shy sophomore from a small town in the provinces. He wears outlandish ties, dirty sweaters, and baggy pants. Not only lacking a crew cut, he is in bad need of a barber nearly all the time and obviously shaves but rarely. Until he arrived at the university he was educated in mediocre public schools, the whole of life to him lies in doodling with mathematics, and his idea of kicks is playing the violin. He is too undersized for athletics, has a horror, in fact, both of sports and drunken manly roughhousing, and his table manners, to put it kindly, are naive. The girls he dates when he dates at all are dogs, his conversation, when he talks at all, is incessantly intellectual and hardly what The New Yorker calls "sophisticated." Besides being childishly ignorant of his own inadequacies and ineptitudes, moreover, he wears thick glasses, has a large nose, and is flagrantly Jewish. None of the 100 percenters on Ivy's back porch were in so repugnant a state as this; even the sorriest of them participated in only a few of the characteristics of such an idea form, and then in an attenuated degree. But one can clearly see why a social club would only be sensible in excluding such an individual, whatever the wisdom might be of admitting him to the university, and most of the officers on Prospect Street would agree that this precisely describes the sort of man who must at all costs be kept out. It is also a fairly accurate portrait of Einstein.

Here is the stigmata, the brand, the taint, clearly seen; the error of wearing white bucks for so solemn an evening, the misdemeanor of a soft, stammering voice, the felony of too loud and sure a tone, the atrocity of a blue suit, here sitting a couple of silent boys with slanted eyes and yellow skin, from here the man who was academically first in the class leaving in discouragement to join Prospect, and here, recurring nearly two times out of every three. Israel's immemorial face is seen; the class has 16 Merit Scholars, 10 were in trouble on Thursday night, and 5 of them, too, are here.

And when they're sure you're not an unctuous agitator for Prospect Club, they are willing to talk to you freely, gather, gather around and tell you calmly about the fist fight at the meeting when Court Club decided to cut its Jewish quota in half because an unintentional influx one year was causing its prestige to flag; about what an ICC president told one of them privately and with a certain sadness one day, that "anti-Semitism in the clubs is something that can neither be exposed, nor proved, nor cured"; about the tacit and explicit demands of club alumni through the graduate boards that, though a few Jews may be admitted to every club, "they must be kept down to reasonable numbers" and that is why Prospect has so many Jews; about what a club representative had just told one of them quite frankly, "we'd like to take you but our quota on you people is filled up." ...

Around midnight, the clubs run out of liquor and every door on Prospect Street spews forth a jubilant stream of staggering sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Leaning on each other, singing, shouting, a few pausing at the gutter to retch quietly for a moment then loudly rejoining the buoyant inebriated throng, they totter off toward the campus or a cafe where they can calm down with a cup of coffee. The fraternal transport is not at is beatific height. Arm in arm they reel indifferent to traffic or the piercing cold: one lifts his hands to the frigid heavens and races down the street backward, his scarf and topcoat wildly flapping in the wind, crying out in ecstasy. "Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!" The unbroken tension of weeks--of a year and a half for some, has ended. Bicker is over at last, for them.

But on Ivy's back porch, for 42 remaining sophomores, the suspense has reached its most pitiless climax. Since almost everyone who was inside has gone home now and the porch has long been growing chilly, the 100 percenters are permitted to move into the Ivy dining room. They can see the silver candelabras now and the rows of empty bottles. Prospect had electric lights and beer tonight. Somehow the number dwindles to 35 as the discouraging hours pass, then 6 give way and trudge toward Prospect, and another 6 are placed as a few clubs each make the sacrifice and each consent to admit one lone 100 percenter (there to be pariah or sycophant for who knows how long). Above, in the library, like secret Teutonic Norns, the ICC meets in constant absolutely closed session, omnipotently spinning fate. Below them, 23 100 percenters remain, half of them Jewish. In Valhalla's lofty and concealed recesses, the list is gone over name by name: where are these to be placed?

An outsider observing Bicker finds it difficult to take the whole thing seriously. The enormous anxieties generated in every member of the sophomore class, the superficiality and downright silliness of its standards and ceremonies, the blatant injustices of the values and principles the system inculcates--all would seem ludicrous in any civilized community, but they are doubly comic when set in one of the nation's greatest universities and practices by what is supposed to be a substantial segment of this generation's intellectual elite.

At the heart of the system, unquestioned by even the 100 percenters themselves, lies the principle of selectivity. As a member of Key and Seal expressed it. "In a democracy we are supposedly free to become as exclusive or as gregarious as we like, and if in a club situation we choose to be exclusive, this is our privilege." From that bit of casuistry--more often expressed as an innocent belief that "you've got a right to choose your friends and the guys you're going to eat with"--the code of values can be relentessly deduced which summarily condemns certain personality traits, ethnic groups, and even scholarship, intellectualism, and originality themselves per se....

Flurries of protest have arisen subsequently on the Princeton campus. In 1918 and again in 1949, it was the demands of the students themselves which forced the clubs to consider the necessity of 100 percent, and finally compelled them to adopt it over strong alumni opposition. The principle has long since, however, degenerated from the intent of its founders, and this year was openly exposed as a patent farce.

At 2:10 in the morning, the meeting above at last breaks up and the decision descends. The sophomores in Ivy's dining room are hushed as they hear the verdict:

"...The ICC will take no responsibility for those who have refused to take bids to Prospect. They consider any reasons for reusing as invalid..."

And so the sophistry predicted by The Princetonian is made complete. Prospect held an open Bicker. Therefore any sophomore wanting to join a club could have gone to Prospect. Therefore 100 percent.

"...The ICC can determine no valid reason for distinguishing between Prospect Cooperative Club and the other 16 upper-class eating clubs, and holds that a bid to Prospect is as good as a bid to any other club. Nor can the ICC determine any valid reason for refusing an opportunity to join Prospect Club..."

They word the statement as firmly as possible, for they already know that no one, no one--least of all themselves--believes a single word of it. But the lie sustains the system for another year.

After a Bicker that took five extra nights of haggling to get a bid for everyone in 1955, The Daily Princetonian and other university organizations demanded the provision of an alternative to the club system. The result was the creation of the now discredited Wilson Lodge. It is in the rapid physical improvement of the Lodge plant, however, and the dim hope that it may eventually evolve into something akin to a Harvard House, that The Princetonian and most of the other critics of the clubs still look for salvation. Just such a project was placed before Woodrow Wilson as a suggested compromise with his demand that the clubs be abolished altogether and the "Quad Plan," as he called it, be made universal. Wilson rejected it. He thought such a "sample quad" would be doomed from the start since only men not in the clubs would join it. The proposal merely dodged the issue, left selectivity untouched, prolonged the evils of exclusion for both those who were in and those who were out--availed nothing, in short, toward the solution of the problem that tormented Wilson at Princeton: "the blighting of the intellectual interests of many of her best minds and finest spirits."

A petition passes among the 100 percenters (100 percenters, whatever other name illogic may give them). It objects that racial and religious discrimination has been exercised in excluding them from the clubs, and pleads for a reply, a public review, a denial or an explanation.

Fifteen sign it.

The ICC flatly refuses to recognize it.

If history and circumstances show anything, therefore, they clearly demonstrate that the evils of the club system will be effectively eliminated only if: 1) the reforms well up directly from the students themselves; and, 2) they strike at the central doctrine of the present system, the basic axiom of selectivity. Compared with all previous reformers, this year's freshman class could usher in the millennium immediately by unanimously signing a petition which would declare they will not join a club unless Bicker is abolished and the university administration is given unqualified authority to assign sophomores to the various clubs by applying the distribution principle to the applications submitted, just as is one in the case of the Houses and the "colleges" at Harvard and Yale.

But the Princeton conscience, both official and actual, has long grown jaded.

A few hours pass and despite going late to bed and the throb of stubborn hangovers, hundreds of undergraduates drag themselves to chapel Sunday morning, signing little white cards at the door to prove they've been there to get credit.

"The university is vitally concerned with all aspects of Bicker"--William D'O. Lippincott, dean of students, Princeton University--"but it has been, and still is, the policy to leave the conduct of club elections completely up to the undergraduates. We do not plan to use pressure to have these men integrated."

...Clouds without shift the shade of the light as it filters majestically down through the great blue stained-glass windows. (Twenty-three sophomores still without a club, 15 of these Jewish, 5 Merit Scholars.)

"The unfortunate allegations of religious discrimination...obscure the plain facts that there are today members of the three major faiths in this country in each of the seventeen eating clubs and that every one of the sophomores who has not joined a club in 1958 was offered club membership."--Robert F. Goheen, president, Princeton University--"It is fair to say that the seriousness of these allegations has been exaggerated by several individuals who sought to impose their wishes on the clubs...."

The voice of the organ echoes down the mighty Gothic nave as the congregation rises to sing the Doxology--

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow..."

"The ICC recognizes the right of every club to be selective. Selectivity implies the right of a club to impose a religious quota, if it so desires,"--text of a statement released by the Interclub Committee, Princeton University, February 10, 1958--"The ICC does not approve of religious and racial discrimination, but has no power to control the Bicker policy of individual clubs. Ultimate responsibility for religious and racial discrimination rests with individual members of individual clubs."

And on the edge of the minister's solemn dark surplice as he sweeps up into the pulpit and the choir and organ thunder the last amen can be seen the orange and black seal of the university, and below it Princeton's motto:

(According to all present indications, Bicker will be back next year.)

"Dei Sub Numine Viget."

Although in recent years there has been much talk of phasing out Princeton's eating club system, "the quest" has persisted, albeit markedly different from the 1958 process. The university's admission of women and increases in the number of applicants have affected the eating-club system more than any other factors. Jim Buck, Bicker chairman at Ivy, says.

Of the 13 clubs on Prospect St., only five--Ivy, Tiger Inn, Cap and Gown, Cottage and Tower--remain "selective," still using Bicker to choose their new members; the other eight use a lottery system to determine club membership. And although Ivy, Tiger Inn and Cottage insist on retaining their all-male exclusiveness, the other clubs now accept women.

But although the system has evolved, one important aspect has not changed: Eating clubs still dominate the social life at Princeton. "Since the clubs are all together on Prospect St., that is pretty much the center of activity, especially since we don't have much of a city," Cathy Chute, Bicker chairman at Cap and Gown says. While freshmen and sophomores must eat at a facility resembling Harvard's freshman union, about 60 per cent of juniors and seniors belong to clubs. And most of those in the minority are "independents" who use the cooking facilities provided in many of the dorms. "Many choose to go independent after having tried a club." Buck says, "but they're handicapped by being secluded a bit."

Upperclassmen interested in Bickering for the selective clubs--about 400 this year (out of about 2300 juniors and seniors)--sign up to receive a schedule of interview appointments at the clubs. Buck is quick to point out that although Bicker retains some elite vestiges, the process is not discriminatory: Even without an affirmative action policy. Ivy has about the same percentage of minority students as Princeton itself does. Buck defends his club's all-male status, saying. "It's one of the few places left for all-male camaraderie. We pride ourselves on a certain gentility: but, more importantly, we have a respect for the women in the university."

Although in general the clubs are not discriminatory. Finnie admits that achieving racial integration is a problem. The clubs "represent a tradition that is WASP and elite, which most Blacks are averse to." Finnie says, adding that many Blacks feel pressure from other Blacks not to join clubs. Anti-Semitism in the Bicker system seems, however to have disappeared, Finnie says.

Like Harvard's Houses, the clubs have distinct "personalities" that vary slightly from year to year. Ivy is the most elite. Cap is the most preppy. Tiger is home for the jocks and Cottage attracts "gentlemen athletes."

Students decide among the nonselective clubs using many of the same criteria Harvard students use to choose a House: the club's reputation, its membership, and the friends' choices. Each of the clubs has a waiting list system, so if someone wants to be in a particular club badly enough, it's usually only a matter of time.

For the selective clubs, something akin to the "100-per-cent rule" of 1958 still exists. If, during Bicker week, a male student completes all his interviews, at all the clubs, he is assured a "hat bid"--one of the clubs must offer him membership. But this rule does not apply to women, who are eligible for only two of the selective clubs.

In the past few years, Princeton officials have toyed with the idea of phasing out the eating clubs. Proposals for establishing a room-and-board system akin to Harvard's Houses or Yale's colleges have been and will continue to be discussed. But, at least for the time being, the basis of Princeton's social system intact. A voice from the past. Buck should have the final word. "Bicker," he says of Ivy. "is almost the life's blood of the place."