Forces opposed to Bicker organize to prepare battle about CURL

This article is reprinted from the April 30, 1980 edition of The Daily Princetonian.

Now and then, when they pause to reflect on the odds against them, they like to compare themselves to the Afghan rebels.

They are few, poorly financed, and in combat with a well entrenched opponent. But they believe they have a potentially huge mass following — and they fight with the emotional intensity of soldiers in an ideological war.

The cause is the elimination of Bicker, and the battleground is CURL [Committee on Undergraduate Residential Life].

Opponents of eating club selectivity have been making sporadic attempts to expel Bicker from Princeton for nearly one hundred years. This time around, they're fixing on negotiations over the upperclass CURL plan.

Some 20 upperclassmen bore witness to this year's opening shots on Thursday night, as long0time anti-Bicker activist Robert K. Massie '78 came to Colonial Club to announce the imminent arrival of some much-needed reinforcements.

Massie used some of the strongest language against selectivity to be heard on campus since the halcyon days of the Social Alternatives Coalition (SAC) he formed as an undergraduate.

With the goal of rekindling anti-Bicker sentiment, Massie has his work cut out for him.

It was Alumni Trustee Kenneth Offit '77, a key strategy for the new Graduate SAC, who came up with the Afghan rebel metaphor, and despite its melodrama a it is apt.

The fledging GSAC will have to fight a two-front war, taking on both Nassau Hall and the historically tenacious selective clubs at a time when the number of students opting for Bicker is on the upswing.

Massie and Offit have a strong sense of history, and they cannot help noticing that the arrival of CURL — in their view a means for the destruction of Bicker — coincides with a marked downturn in campus sentiment against selectivity. For them, it is a bitter irony.

For the first time in the sporadic, century-old campaign against Bicker, the two alums believe the campus has the power to banish selectivity — but they fear the open clubs no longer wish to try.

Recent interviews with open club officers indicate that, by and large, the eight non-selective clubs take a live-and-let-live stance on the subjects of clubs choosing to retain Bicker.

In his public statements, for the GSAC, Massie has accused the university of abandoning the principles that launched the Committee on Undergraduate Life.

Skirting controversy

"If you're looking to the university for support for CURL, forget it," Massie told the 20 upperclassmen at Colonial. "They don't want to do anything that could cause any trouble."

Provost Rudenstine, on the other hand, insists that the university wants an upperclass CURL system very badly.

But Massie and Rudenstine are speaking two different languages. Massie's CURL would radically restructure Prospect Avenue. Nassau Hall's CURL would give it economic stability.

In many ways, the GSAC identifies much more closely with CURL's second interim report than its final product.

"We believe strongly that the eventual success of a unified social system for juniors and seniors would depend heavily on its ability to alter the rather separate social and dining patterns that currently prevail," stated the second interim report.

"Unless a new design can produce such an alteration, we could not recommend it."

For "alteration," read "end of Bicker." Since last June's final report, Nassau Hall has expressed considerably different sentiment.

The selective clubs "can't participate in the sense of having formal agreements with the university," Associate Provost Richard R. Spies GS '72 said recently, "but if students are interested in and want to join those clubs, the process has to accommodate that."

With Nassau Hall thinking in those terms and the open clubs largely trading confrontation for cooperation with the selective clubs, the GSAC has entered the CURL fray just as the forces opposing Bicker stand on the verge of yet another defeat.