The Gentlemanly Revolt at Princeton Fails

Prospect St. at night is magic. Fifteen Victorian mansions line the street, glowing gold from their windows. Princeton men in v-neck sweaters and blue button-down shirts walk down the sidewalk in groups of three or four. A few groups peel off at each building: Colonial, with its high pillars; Cap and Gown, with its Tudor facade; Ivy; Tower Cottage. It feels like someone should be humming "Going Back to Nassau Hall" in the background.

Inside the clubs, the Princeton men sit at round tables and are served their vegetable soup by Negro servants in white coats and black bow ties. A servant calls a club man "Mr. Bradley," and a club man calls a servant "Thomas." After dinner, the club men retire to their walnut-panelled parlor to talk, smoke cigars and sip coffee. Then they wander off to the billiard tables downstairs or to the studies and library upstairs. Everything is refined and muted and comfortable.

But some people want to change all this. Mostly they are dissatisfied with Bicker, the ritual by which the clubs choose their members from the sophomore class each year after January finals.

This year the revolt against Bicker failed. The great monolith was too entrenched. A group of ten of the biggest men on campus got together and tried to budge it. They included the president of the Undergraduate Council, the chairman of the Daily Princetonian, the president of the Orange Key Society, five other club members and the secretary-treasurer of the class of 1969. It didn't take them long to find out that the club system with its 90 years of tradition was not about to be moved.

This year's revolt was the seventh major one in the system's history. All of them have been gentlemanly uprisings because that is the way things are done at Princeton. That is what all that walnut paneling does to you.

Nobody thought of activism or picketing or confrontation. What the ten-man committee wanted was rational discussion of issues in a calm, gentlemanly way. In November they issued a 16-page pamphlet entitled "Report on Bicker and Proposals for Change." It outlined their ideas for changing Bicker and told why they wanted it changed. It influenced a lot of people. The committee took a poll and found that a little less than 40 per cent of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes agreed with their proposal.

But the clubs were the key, and the clubs turned it down.

Bicker is a frightening and trivial experience. Almost everyone who goes through it says that. For six nights each sophomore is interviewed by representatives from all the clubs, who visit him in his room. If he's good, the sophomore will get eight or nine bids to join different clubs. If he's not so good (according to the clubs' scale of "coolness," as the system's opponents call the criterion), then he will get just one or two bids, or maybe none at all.

Inevitably, someone cries, someone gets irreparably hurt. On Open House night, everyone but the 30 or 40 who don't have bids yet boozes it up happily. It can be a very bad scene. Locked away in a room in one of the clubs, the members of the sophomore Bicker committee (top sophomore class members) and the Bicker, chairman from all the clubs get together to try to put everyone still bidless in some club. One Colonial man, who was a member of the sophomore committee last year called it "a very terrible thing. People were just casually trading off other human beings as if they were cattle. You know, I'll take this one if you'll take those two."

The idea is to achieve 100 per cent Bicker -- everyone who signs up for Bicker is supposed to get into a club. Last year only one Princeton man didn't make it. He seemed resigned to his fate. He had effectively rejected the system and even developed his own rational. "The clubs strike me as being an escape hatch, as being void of any kind of reality. The idea of being buddy-buddy just bothers me," he said.

The one who didn't make it--a music major from St. Paul's--is now a member of the Woodrow Wilson Society, the University's alternative to the clubs, which was established after the anti-Semitism scandal of 1958. If a Princeton man doesn't want to go through with Bicker or becomes dissatisfied with the system he can join Wilson or he can go Indepndent and eat in his room or in the town. The Wilson Society costs $830 to join, including board and fees. Most of the clubs cost over $1000. An Independent spends $400-$500 on food.

More than 90 per cent of the upperclassmen belong to clubs. Clubs are for eating, partying, talking, and little else. One club--Tower--sponsors speakers and discussions, but none of the other clubs do anything like that.

There is a clearly defined hierarchy at Princeton, and everyone knows about it. Especially blind dates from Vassar. There are also rigid stereotypes, and for the most part they hold. Ivy men are the aristocracy. Tiger and Cannon men are jocks (Tiger is for gentleman-jocks). Cottage men are campus leader types. And so on for all fifteen.

The present Bicker system, by which the clubs pick the sophomores they want, perpetuates the hierarchy and the stereoyptes. Bottom clubs are forced to "top cut"--not give bids to campus big shots they know will opt for one of the top five (Cottage, Ivy, Cap and Gown, Colonial, and Tiger Inn). The top clubs are pretty well assured of getting the men they want, and during Bicker they send out their best members to get the desirable sophomores.

The committee that drafted the new Bicker proposals objects to the system's selectivity. "Built upon the selecton process, the hierarchy is the testament to the ethic generated by Bicker--the nebulous concept of 'coolness,'" the proposal reads. What the committee wants is a system similar to Harvard's House application system. Sophomores would list their first three club preferences, which would be respected as much as possible. The effect, of course, would be to make the clubs far more heterogeneous. The proposal would destroy the hierarchy, and a lot of the trauma of the Bicker ordeal. But it would also create a kind of club system a great number of Princeton men would not want.

Bicker is an ordeal that you have to be prepared to take. The sophomore committee sponsors panel discussions on the morality of it, the psychology of it, the history of it. Representatives come around to all the sophomores' room with advice: "Just act yourself now. Don't panic or anything. Don't try to be anyone you really aren't. Just act yourself and everything will be all right." The talk in Commons during the weeks before is always about Bicker--getting Bicker groups together, figuring out chances to get in, on and on.

Scares Some

The talk bores some sophomores. It scares many others. There is always uncertainty. It is like applying to college all over again, only worse. Failure in front of peers is horrible to think about.

After exams, Bicker begins. Representatives of the clubs come in and check out your brand of rep striped tie, yellow shirt, gray trousers, navy blazer, and freshly shined shoes. Talk starts with the room. "Not a bad room for sophomores. Nice picture over there. Nice carpet too," the club man will say. Then there are nods and "thanks" and the talk changes.

The interviewer clears his throat. "Well, what do you fellows think about clubs anyway. Why do you want to join Ivy?" And in five or ten minutes it is over. Another club representative comes in and the ordeal begins again.

The club men report back to their clubs and write comments about you in Bicker Book right under your picture cut out of the Freshman Herald. The next night, if you're lucky, Ivy will come around again and talk to your group. And then maybe again and again. And maybe you will get in.

F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Amory Blaine's bicker in This Side of Paradise:

"With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the 'nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy,' very much at ease and quite unaware of the object of the call. When the fatal night arrived early in March, he slid smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much wonder."

In the end, everyone or nearly everyone gets in. Not so easily as Amory Blake, but they get in. Those who get into bottom clubs soon develop a rationale. One of them told me: "Of course, Dial isn't one of the top clubs, But you know, I wouldn't fit in Ivy or Cottage. I'm not that type. I feel comfortable where I am."

Bicker selections are superficial judgments. But, even though many people are condemned to life in a bottom club because of the system, it doesn't bother Clinch S. Belser, chairman of the Interclub Committee and president of Cottage: "Bicker judgments are partially based on the superficial qualities of people. However, superficial compatability facilitates social interchange and relaxation. Thus, it is not totally adverse that superficialities influence Bicker decisions."

The System

So that is the system. However cruel and arbitrary it might be, few Princeton men reject it. There has not been a major change in its structure since Ivy Club was founded in 1879. Once a sophomore has gone through Bicker, he settles down in his club and is very content and comfortable. The club stereotype seems to crystallize his personality. He may have come to Princeton vaguely thinking he was preppy, but when he made Ivy he was sure of it. Patterns form. The club man begins to think he cannot get along with anyone outside his circle of club friends. "I just wouldn't feel comfortable," the Dial man would say. So he doesn't try to mix with other people.

"The club is your whole world here," one Colonial member told me. The town of Princeton has three movie theatres, a few magazine stands, and assorted hamburger joints. New York is a 90-minute bus ride away. There are no girls' colleges anyway nearby. The college is isolated and so all social life, and soon, all life, revolves around the clubs.

The ten men who tried to change the system this year took on a mammoth task. Because of new admissions policies and a zephyr of twentieth century elagitarianism, they thought that they stood a chance. But the monolith was immobile, and the Gentlemanly Revolt wouldn't work. The attitudes of the students, the administration, the aulmni were not easy to change.

When it was all over last month, and the committee knew it could not do a thing, one of the members said it would be at least ten years before the system would change. And he was being optimistic. Very optimistic.

(Tomorrow: A timid administration, a fanatic alumni, and a complacent student body caused this year's Bicker revolt to fail, and could keep Princeton's peculiar anachronism around for a long, long time.)