all the guys from prep schools,

2021/05/21

But all the guys from prep schools, or so it seemed to me, had Blakely at their door. The president quoted an alumnus from the Class of 1939: Every great advance has come about, and always will, because someone was frustrated by the status quo; because someone exercised the skepticism, the questioning, and the kind of curiosity which, to borrow a phrase, blows the lid off everything.. Within a few weeks of privileged club membership, I was ready to quit and strike out on my own as an independent, a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter as pro-club propaganda would have it. My other bicker-mate didnt so as well, but he at least got several bids from lower-tier clubs to choose from. We attacked one of the eating clubs, Cannon Club, for bullying and lewd behavior. donated to Princeton University, reopened as a student lounge, sold to Princeton University, formerly part of, demolished; now the site of the Center for Jewish Life. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a member of the University Cottage Club.

Colman, a Quaker, openly opposed the Vietnam War. English department theses werent supposed to blather on. Sittenfeld insisted on Stevenson Hall, which it is still named today. The clubs initiate their new members the following weekend. We had a steady stream of visitors to our room, but it did not mean there was an equal interest in all of us. Other parties are only open to members or students with special passes, which must be obtained from members. But not in the late 1960s.

The son of a Presbyterian missionary in India, an all-around star with the Class of 1940, and perennially decked out in bowties and tweeds, Goheen could easily be seen as a bulwark against the changes affecting higher education in general.

My respect for Pieringer immediately grew he had an opinion and he wasnt afraid to voice it. You have permission to edit this article. So which would you rather be, one clubbie asked me: A big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? Committed to making nice, I picked one at random. Princeton's eating clubs are the primary setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and the clubs appeared prominently in the 2004 novel The Rule of Four. As tradition dictated, the chairman of the Princetonian reviewed the show on opening night, dashed off a notice for the next mornings paper, and that same night, the president of the Triangle Club came by the printing press, got a copy hot off the press, and ran it back the opening night cast party to read it aloud. Thomforde had a slew of bids and entered the prestigious Ivy Club. Stocked with old standby features that would fill the space and please the old farts and the advertisers, the issue was so predictable I would be able to put it out singlehandedly.

It was the first time in my life I had ever been kicked out of a class. As I made the case for coeducations inevitability Wilsons protestations grew louder.

A classmate of mine, Jim Floyd, recently came up with a list of changes that were initiated under Goheens tenure as president. By March national politics were beginning to seep into our pages. But that didnt explain it because I knew plenty of Jewish guys (Jewish in a certain way, some would argue) in the top-tier clubs. At one point in freshman year I had seven bylined features in one month, plus who knows how much unbylined office duties and evenings working on the crew at the printing press on Chambers Street, where I endured the boot camp of Larry Dupraz (who in 1984 help me produce the first issue of U.S. 1). By all conventional Daily Princetonian logic and tradition, Durkee was the heavy favorite. It was a novel approach, but the chairman and his managing editor liked the idea. He didnt get a bid and had to rely on his wealthy roommates to get him into a club. Back home for the break, I was invited by the Princeton Club of Binghamton to be the speaker at the annual holiday luncheon. Reopened in 2011 as Cannon Dial Elm in the Cannon facility. After a year and a half, I was finally ready to be a student, as well as a student journalist. I have already mentioned several and here are some more that happened from 1965 to 1969: An increase in the percentage of public school students; pass-fail courses; the hiring of the first woman faculty member and the first black administrator; and the addition of young alumni to the trustees. I would do without cold sodas in the middle of the night, and I could save a few bucks. But this being 1968, I dared to be different. The now-defunct eating clubs include Campus Club, Key and Seal Club, Arch Club, Gateway Club, Court Club, Arbor Inn, and Prospect Club. As the process operated then, if a club was considering a bid to one person in the group, it had to send representatives to interview everyone in the group, even if the others had already been cut.

Screwed at Bicker: Detail from a 1967 cartoon by Jean-Christophe Agnew 68. As we were dividing the money, the senior who hired us came by, saw the cash, and snatched it up. Things might not always be the same. Students rank the five sign-in clubs, or wait-lists for those clubs, in their order of preference. Thank you, Bob Goheen. Colonial, like most clubs, had a predominantly black wait staff, supervised by a black house manager, a kindly, avuncular gentleman named Griffin. In my mind two or three of us may have had a very slim chance. To ensure that I could have my afternoons and evenings free to try out for the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, I took the oddball student jobs of going dorm to dorm on Friday nights to sell doughnuts, and then selling souvenirs at home football games on Saturday afternoons. Eventually the outgoing chairman and his managing editor came over to the dorm room and made the announcement: Congratulations, Rein, youre the new chairman.. Its already under construction.. The two undergraduates represented the extremes of the Bicker experience. The reading load was overwhelming, especially to me, consumed by a five-day-a-week routine at the Daily Princetonian. Police prevailed. My final thought came after I checked out the bids that other guys got and discovered that the Bicker process had put lots of guys exactly where you would have expected. Princeton Future was co-founded, incidentally, by the college president who quoted Whyte and who would call me out later for being perversely ill-tempered, but in the spirit of the 60s would still tolerate me. Even our senior banquet broke a few traditions. But by the next May, 1970, an anti-war demonstration at Kent State in Ohio resulted in the fatal shooting of four undergraduates by the National Guard.

It was an envelope that I happily opened. Sittenfeld had a Bicker path identical to mine (I only discovered recently): One bid to Key and Seal, and the petition path into Colonial. The first one chosen was Brent Henry, one of the dozen or so black students in our class who eventually became a vice chairman of the board.

In that same year Durkee wrote an article titled A new era for the Negro at Princeton? that later won a national award. Today there are just 11 clubs, only six of them selective. I returned to Princeton in 1972 for a one-semester gig. If you dont do this, you may even find yourself tramping about her campus, when you might be here.. After getting no bids he dropped out of college for the rest of the semester and reentered in the fall. Look to the Navy. In Wolffs own case, the trauma might have been even more severe. But some people make it look hard. (Or, I thought, some people like Litz make it look easy even when it is hard.). Ethel Kennedy wanted to make sure college journalists were at the funeral at St. Patricks and on the train to Washington and Arlington Memorial Cemetery. When Bleak House, the 800-plus-page novel by Charles Dickens, showed up as assigned reading for one week in a particular course, I knew I would pass on it.

It is inevitable that, at some point in the future, Princeton is going to move into the education of women.

When the theses were returned, with critical commentary and the final grade sealed in an envelope, most of the English seniors gathered at the Annex, the basement bar across the street from the library. By 2006, the difference was over $2,000 for most clubs, and this difference was not covered by university financial aid.

While IDA rented its building from the university (and while some of its staff enjoyed positions in academic departments such as mathematics), its building on Prospect Avenue, near where Bowen Hall is now, was not technically part of the campus. She was a huge fan. Our indictment was pretty harsh, and some Cannon members objected, saying it was only a few guys in the club who were out of control. I continued to foment disruptive events at the Daily Princetonian through the end of our term. At some point, though, that Princeton Promise surfaced.

While I did not recall a word of the presidents speech until recently, while researching the life of William H. Whyte, I suspect that at the time I would have shrugged it off as rhetoric that had no application for me. On other occasions, we voiced outrage partly for the sake of being outrageous. In another example of Princeton being big enough to have a star or two, but small enough so that no one got lost (not even the struggling English major), I made a deal with Litz. That editorial sparked a rebuttal in the next days paper written by Bob Durkee. He broke into tears as he recounted the scene. Everyone pitched in, except me. And, despite all the tumult that was about to unfold, the university would ultimately deliver on the Princeton Promise to an extent that I never fully appreciated until the final term of my final year. I figured I couldnt read every assigned novel in an English course. Fraternities and secret societies were banned from Princeton from the middle of the 19th century until the 1980s, with the exception of the university's political, literary, and debating societies, the American Whig Society ("Whig") and the Cliosophic Society ("Clio"), which had been founded at Princeton before the American Revolution.

With my 20-20 hindsight, 50 years in the making, I can say that sometimes we called out institutions and individuals with the best of reasoned opinion behind us. Thinking back to our freshman week, and Robert Goheens call for us to challenge the status quo, causes me to rethink my opinion of the man. Independent life. Now he was approaching 80 and a retired banker. Still, Princeton? A few days later we were reporting on a throng of 1,000 to 1,500 students on the front lawn of Nassau Hall, a protest that ended without any occupation of Goheens office. Of course. It didnt put me anywhere, and maybe I was just not a club type, and maybe more importantly there was nothing wrong with that. Reunions at Princeton are more than beer and bands.

Given the role of the Princeton eating clubs in the tumultuous 1960s, readers might be interested in a discussion on the origins and architectural grandeur of the clubs by Clifford Zink, author of The Princeton Eating Clubs, on Friday, May 31, at 10:30 a.m. at Lewis Thomas Laboratory, Room 003. In a 1967 editorial the Princetonian described Key and Seal as a catch-all for the casualties of Bicker, and a club that served the elite clubs by allowing them to claim that, since everyone got into a club, Bicker couldnt be that bad. At the very bottom, in those days, was Key and Seal, located in one of the brick mansions farthest down Prospect Avenue. Additionally, some bicker clubs conduct a smaller "Fall Bicker" for third and fourth year students. (Today the Princeton dorms have their own laundry rooms, and the machines are free.). It could have been an expression of the reality that the IDA was not part of Princeton University. Hundreds of students picketed the event.

And nine years before that Goheen had worked with the clubs to resolve the crisis of Dirty Bicker. That left Bob Durkee, the second in command, to handle a contingent of ABC members demanding various items be included in the next days paper. I hustled back to Princeton, and produced a 16-page special Reunions issue. Answers flowed like effluent through a well pitched pipe. At the end of the day, I figured, after three meals, the napkins would get washed and we would get clean ones. One word of caution as one alumnus to another. My second thought was that maybe some clubs had dismissed me as Jewish (even though I am not). It appeals to people frustrated by the status quo who want to exercise the skepticism, questioning, and curiosity recommended by Whyte in that quotation from the opening ceremonies in 1965. But my chance never came the others never asked me. I was one of those freshmen in 1965. I would never want the clubs to vanish from Princeton they have a rich social history that dates back to the 19th century, and they are a viable option for some students today. In November of 1968 Yale had announced that it would admit women in the fall of 1969. I repeated the grade.

The days of your life will be far happier if early in your marriage you perform an adequate snow job for Princeton. At a time when the eating clubs and Bicker were still contentious issues, my status as an independent rather than a club member helped my candidacy. Finally he shouted out: So where are they going to put the home for unwed mothers?, I didnt skip a beat. Student Co-ops: student co-ops are becoming an increasingly popular option on campus. [1] Each eating club occupies a large mansion on Prospect Avenue (Prospect Street until 1900), one of the main roads that runs through the Princeton campus, with the exception of Terrace Club which is just around the corner on Washington Road. The fact that the American political process was run by political machines and party operatives. adlai