Rooting for Mathefeller

If you had been in the East Room of Murray-Dodge this past Monday at four, you would have been privy to an amusing example of the absurdities that can follow from rigid application of academic rules. Turns out that Princeton is up for re-accreditation, a painstaking process required once every ten years by a standards group called the Middle States Association. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and the leader of the visiting team whose job it is to make sure Princeton still deserves to be called an accredited university, cut right to the chase, with an apparent talent for understatement: "This is, obviously, a formality."

As part of its valiant effort not to seem pointless, the visiting team had assembled a group of students including me to talk about the "Princeton student experience" and how that experience might be changed by the expansion and reorganization of campus life that will begin in 2007. When we students tried to draw the visitors' attention to specific details of the plan that we thought deserved reconsideration they demurred, telling us that they wanted instead to get a "feel" for our social and academic lives. This determined generality on their part served, I take it, to deflect attention from the fact that most operational details of the new college system have already been nailed down, and are not about to be reconsidered as part of a once-a-decade bureaucratic formality.

A lot of these details are, luckily for all of us, in wonderful shape. One of my favorite take-home facts from the report given to participants in Monday's meeting was that the four-year colleges will offer Spelman-esque rooms, with kitchen facilities and a single for each suite occupant, to entice upperclassmnen to remain in the colleges.

But our discussion did shed light on one pivotally important flaw in the University's plan. The colleges are to be "paired" together —Whitman with Forbes, Butler with Wilson, Mathey with Rocky — and only Whitman, (the newly renovated) Butler and Mathey will be expanded to four-year colleges. Students will still get randomly assigned to one of the six as incoming freshmen, and if you happen to be in a two-year college — Forbes, Wilson or Rocky — you'll have to switch into one of the four-year colleges if you want to remain within the system at all. "Four-year college system" is a euphonic misnomer — what we're really headed toward is a "Two-year/four-year hybrid college system" that promises to be every bit as ungainly as the phrase suggests.

The University says it wants to foster a sense of college loyalty among students. It amounts to creating something like the ten tribes of ancient Rome — ersatz social groups giving rise to new loyalties that take the place of old ones (in this case, the eating clubs). The planners are right — cohesion and espirit de corps are indispensable parts of any viable social alternative for upperclassmen. But the colleges at Harvard and Yale, on which we are modeling our own next move, maintain exclusive claims on their member students — kids don't switch around.

How could a Forbes student, forced to migrate to Whitman (or even farther away) possibly carry into her upperclass years the fanatic devotion that makes Forbesians famous on campus? "Die for the Inn!" has a certain ring to it; "Die for the Whitman/Forbes pair!" does not.

A dean familiar with the planning process informs me that a limit on the number of nice rooms available for upperclassmen and a desire to phase the new plan in gradually, lie behind the administration's timidity. A full four-year system might come later, I'm told.

If the University really wants to integrate academic and social life across all four years, it must permit students to stay in the college they have learned to love. If that means changing which dorms count as part of which colleges, or increasing the number of upperlassmen allowed to stay in the college system, it's a price well worth paying. The current agenda of half-measures risks falling short of a critical mass of student enthusiasm, and ought to be abandoned in favor of a real four-year system from the start. David Robinson is a philosophy major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at dgr@princeton.edu.