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E-PrinceThis weekend, prospective students will stroll across campus in droves, trailing a real live Princeton student doing the trademark Orange Key backwards walk. The articulate, personable and finally-paid guide will punctuate his or her description of social and academic opportunities ...
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So true. Thank you for writing this!
There's a lot of problems with this opinion:
1) You don't have much credibility because you're not affiliated with Orange Key in any way and you seriously lack evidence. What evidence you do have seems to come from one tour you left early as a pre-frosh (which is pretty rude since tours are only an hour long and everyone notices when you leave) and some scattered pieces of information about the process that (when put into context) aren't actually that bad. For example, anyone who has gone through the guide selection process will know that the story of the architecture school was pulled because the architecture school requested it to be pulled. They get really mad even when we joke about it, so out of respect for them we leave it out - not out of some obligation to be positive all the time. Second, we don't laugh about Fine Hall because tours don't go there. It's pretty far away from pretty much everything we actually do get to, so pointing out some ugly building in the far background of the scenery and saying "HAHA look how bad our math building looks!" would be awkward and stupid. Third, the amount that people talk about eating clubs differs from guide to guide. It's true that some guides don't give it the adequate time of day in their tours, but that's a pretty broad brush to paint with considering your apparently small body of evidence. I could go on, but my main point stands - your evidence and analysis of that evidence is limited.
2) You talk about how all guides are positive all the time. That's not weird. The people who are positive about Princeton are going to want to try to be the people who represent Princeton to prospective applicants and students. If you hated Princeton, would you really spend an hour of each week talking to high school students about it? It's true that sometimes guides can get overpositive, but think about the perspective of the parents and students. If the guide is even a little bit negative, you can see the panic set in and their perception of the school changes immediately. A little negativity goes a long way in giving parents and high school students a bad impression of Princeton. For that reason, I've seen guides try to couch flaws in Princeton in positive language or show that despite some flaw the University as a whole is still a great place to be.
3) Another criticism was basically that this information doesn't sink in during the tours and that various members of the tour either tune out or ask questions for selfish purposes. First off, thinking you know all the details of what motivates others is pretty presumptuous. These people might *shocker* really be interested in the answers to their questions. I do realize that a lot of audience members tune in or tune out for parts of the tour, but that's the thing about the tour - it has to be designed to reach a large audience since you don't know who your audience is going to be composed of. Some people care about certain aspects of Princeton more than others, so you go through all the main things as thoroughly as possible knowing people will tune in or tune out based on what interests them about Princeton. Also, they chose to go on the tour knowing what these things are like. If they really thought tours were so useless, they just wouldn't go on them.
4) There's no positive vision in your article. All you basically say is that Orange Key guides give too much information that isn't ultimately useful and that they don't make fun of Princeton enough. There's no remedy to any of the "problems" here - just straight complaining. If you were in Orange Key and had a positive solution you might be able to make some headway on what you see as problems, but instead you've chosen to whine about how something you're not a part of doesn't do things the way you think they should do things. Awesome.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Also, don't take this personally. I'm sure you're a really nice, wonderful person. Your opinions are just poorly formed and badly argued.
Remembered jokes about the University, most of which would be ideal for Orange Key tours:
1) Alexander Hall was constructed using the Senior Thesis Plans of an alum who was hugely successful in business after graduation; unfortunately, his thesis grade was an F.
2) Woody Woo at its construction ruined the architectural integrity of the campus for all time.
3) With the introduction of residential colleges in the 1980's, the University transformed 1901 and Henry Halls from the Freshmen slums into the Junior slums overnight.
4) The sculpture in front of the E-Quad was constructed to reflect the history of the University as an all male institution.
Another light comment for Orange Key guides:
Forbes College was originally the Princeton Inn, a hotel that went bankrupt and was purchased by the University for housing expansion. The reason the hotel went bankrupt was that no one coming to visit Princeton wanted to stay so far away from campus.