Class interaction can be vital part of Princeton experience

I read with interest and bemusement that the University is planning a four-year college that in a newspaper report Anne Gordon '01 observes, "brings together graduate students and undergraduates in the same living space" and is "a very positive thing." University Vice-President Thomas Wright '62 commented, "We heard voices that one of the problems in undergraduate life is that they don't have ways to interact with one another."

This is, in part, coming full circle, for that's the way it was. One of the great Princeton experiences for my generation of 650 classmates was that we lived in dorms with students of all classes ahead and behind mixed with us. Many of them remain friends to this day. We also developed an extraordinary class bonding — now lost to present generations — because freshmen year we all ate in the same commons (now part of Rockefeller College). As a result, every student at the table was your classmate. So too in sophomore year our class bonding was further strengthened by eating in sophomore commons (the room above freshman commons). All of the then 19 clubs were Bicker clubs (somehow we all survived), and because we had been bonded as a class for the first two years, we got to know many of the clubs and their members by visiting classmates in their different clubs while also getting to know even more students ahead and behind us.

Times change, but I wouldn't trade my Princeton campus living experience, for I came to know personally or know by sight a very high percentage of my 650 classmates. This has provided us all a lifetime of bonding that makes reunions very special, as we renew friendships with hundreds and hundreds of classmates — plus so many others from adjoining classes — thanks to the lifestyle afforded us as students.

While I know classes for the last 30 years turn out large numbers at reunions for the best old place of all — it hasn't changed that much — it's sad that while they seem bonded to Princeton they tell me in truth they simply don't know that many of their classmates.