Two steps forward, one step back

The insurgents bet that they were thinking longer term than the sated masses. After all, they thought, the battle to reshape the Street would last decades: Students only stay for four years, and new freshmen would have no conception of what normal once was. New students would arrive on a campus where the eating clubs, those last bastions of the Great Satan, alcohol, were forced to bar their doors to all but their members for fear of lawsuits, some serious and some specious. On this campus, a steadily expanding four-year-college system would be slowly but inexorably annexing former independent realms, and the nine residential colleges would reign supreme. In short, these future frosh would know a University utterly alien to us but entirely familiar to those with no experience of anything else.

It isn't easy for college students to grasp a 20-year timeframe. That is, after all, our entire lifetime to date. But to an administrator who has been working at Princeton since before Eliot Spitzer '81 ever considered running for USG chairman, 20 years seems a lot less daunting. A lot can happen in that time. In 1988, the Iron Curtain still existed, Ronald Reagan was president, and three eating clubs didn't admit women. Princeton is going to be incredibly different in the future, and the steps we are currently taking are pushing us in fits and starts toward a future much like the one I described above. Due to the length of time involved, these changes are necessarily gradual and consequently are nearly imperceptible as they occur and titanic in retrospect.

The truth of the matter is that the administration just doesn't like the eating club system, especially Bicker. No one seriously doubts that if the administration could design Princeton from scratch, the eating clubs would either not be there or would be little more than orange and black finals clubs - pretentious, neutered enclaves with no real impact on campus social life. This is hardly an original statement, but it bears repeating. As I have made it before, I won't run through the supporting examples.

The other important truth of the matter is that the University is doing the next best thing to starting from scratch: comprehensively rebuilding and shuffling the campus to benefit the four-year colleges. In addition to identifying three possible sites for future residential colleges north of Forbes, south of Baker Rink and in the backyards of Charter Club and Cloister Inn in the 10-year plan, the administration has taken the much more immediate step of making extensive "inventory adjustments" in its allocation of on-campus housing. That's bureaucratese for the annexation of Spelman 8 and part of Little Hall.

This final decision, while not quite so outrageously egregious as the original plan to take either Spelman 7 or Wright Hall in lieu of Little, is still a serious move that will in all likelihood end up being permanent. Because while you can check into Whitman any time you want, you must be "convinced ... to ‘stay home' in the colleges," as a University committee report put it in 2005. So while I applaud the University for partly bowing to student pressure by giving back some of Spelman to its rightful inhabitants, i.e. independents, this is only one step back after several forward.

If you don't think that this change in the allocation of housing affects the eating clubs, then I respectfully submit that you need to look a little deeper. In response to my column "Geeks Bearing Gifts" in September 2006, Executive Vice President Mark Burstein argued that the four-year-college system was not a threat to the eating clubs because it would not have sufficient housing capacity to hold more than 250 upperclassmen when completed in 2012. That we already exceed that number by 20 percent shows how meaningless this argument is if the University continues to "adjust" how many dorm rooms are in the colleges.

Reasonable people can agree that changes in a zero-sum system will impact all sides. That is to say, if you only have a certain number of housing units and you choose to transfer some of those from people who are mostly in an eating club to people who are in a residential college, that's going to change the calculus of room draw. You can say you're just adding options all you want, but when an addition is accompanied by subtraction somewhere else ,you'll have to forgive me if I draw conclusions. As we stutter-step into the future, I'd urge everyone to broadly review the University's actions and never stop asking: cui bono? All too often, the answer to that question is the same.

 

Barry Caro is a history major from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.