The start of a new 'millenium'

For years after graduation, former Princetonians look back on their years as students and remember them with old friends during Reunions, held annually at the end of the academic year throughout campus.

One long-standing tradition of Reunions is the class beer jacket, usually worn by alumni so that nicer jackets and blazers are not damaged while drinking. For years past and years to come, the jackets have provided and will provide a common badge of pride, and sometimes embarrassment, under which the class members can unite. This is a tradition that will follow Princetonians even into the next millennium.

This year, however, the graduating class will be taking their beer jackets into a whole new kind of millennium — one that is misspelled. This week members of the senior class received a jacket on which millennium is spelled "millenium."

"It was an error by the company," senior class president Justin Browne explained. Reunion Outfitters — the jacket printing company — was sent the design with the word millennium spelled correctly, Browne said.

While the company did send samples for the class officers to check fabric and color, they never sent anything to check the design or the spelling of millennium, he explained.

"I don't understand why the jacket company spelled it wrong," Browne said, adding that even the common confusion of the word's spelling should not have been a problem for the printers.

Browne theorized that the spelling error may have occurred because of some older versions of computer word processing programs that list millennium in their spell check programs with only a single letter n. "That's all sort of secondary for me," he explained. "We spelled it right."

Whichever party is to blame, many seniors have expressed their discontent with the infamous error on the jacket, which was designed by Katie Lyons '01. "I'm upset about it because we didn't get what we ordered," Browne noted. He said he was also upset for his fellow classmates who are unhappy with the jackets.

Browne and the other officers of the class have been in discussion with several deans in an attempt to get an idea of how to solve the problem, or at least to be compensated for it.

"We clearly presented them with something that was not confusing," Browne said, adding that because the error was definitely not the students' fault, the company should be willing to do something to make up for it.

Unfortunately, it does not seem plausible that the jackets can be replaced in the time remaining in the academic year. "I honestly don't think that [they are] going to be able to fix the jacket in 20 days," Browne said. Instead, Browne said he hopes that the class can receive some sort of repayment for the mistake.

Though the mistake on the jackets is a downer to the end of the class' senior year, Browne said that he is taking it in stride. The class has had an amazing year, he said, from the Bob Dylan concert to getting Bill Cosby to speak at class day — and maybe their luck just ran out.