President Tilghman addressed the USG about four-year colleges, fraternities and sororities and plans for dining services at its meeting Sunday night to answer questions about the "State of the Princeton Community."
"The thing that students rank the highest during their Princeton careers is their academic experience, and the number two thing is their experience in the residential colleges," Tilghman said. "So obviously, the residential colleges are a big part of students' life here."
The future four-year colleges — Butler, Mathey and Whitman — will accommodate 100 juniors and seniors who would live and have a meal plan in each of the colleges. Tilghman said that upperclassmen could opt for a "mixed meal plan," under which they could continue to be members of eating clubs while having a dining services meal plan.
The four-year colleges will also be more closely affiliated with graduate students, with more graduate students collectively doing the work that is currently done by the assistant masters.
Greek Life
Tilghman said in response to a question that "as of now, there is nothing on the table regarding fraternities and sororities . . . whether to take any proactive steps, positive or negative, next year."
The administration had not yet made a decision regarding whether or not to reissue the letter sent last summer discouraging incoming freshmen from joining fraternities and sororities in the fall, she said.
"This is a major issue with the trustees," she said. "They're trying to understand the impact of fraternities and sororities on this campus — where they have been positive, where they have been negative."
"We are not going to make a discussion without consultation with students," Tilghman said, adding that she welcomes the idea of having a meeting with members of Greek institutions on campus to find out more about their impact on campus life.
Dining Services
Tilghman said that the "most exciting" plan for the future is the change being planned for dining services.
A task force that was created earlier this year traveled to different universities over the summer in order to see "how residential dining was handled in different colleges," Tilghman reported. The aim of the task force is to make the food served in dining halls "more healthy and taste better."
"Another thing that we did after visiting all these colleges is that we want to make the dining halls not only have better food, but feel different," Tilghman said. "We're thinking of hiring architects for all the dining halls in order to give them separate characters."
The University is also considering simplifying the current meal plans available to students.
"At the moment, [the meal plans] are so complicated and have so many variations that people have no clue when they can eat, when they can get late meals, etc.," Tilghman said.
Tilghman also said that she has no problems with a University-sponsored bar on campus, adding, "The drinking age being 21 is one of the biggest problems with promoting responsible drinking on campus."
TigerVision
Later in the evening, Cynthia Yim '07 and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne presented a proposal to turn TigerVision — currently a blue screen that lists campus events — into a 24-hour student-run television channel.
"For a long time, there has been general dissatisfaction with the way we run TigerVision," Dunne said. "We're going to try to upgrade media presence on campus."
The idea behind the 24-hour channel is that it would "feature events that students would want to go to but could not because of schedule conflicts," said Yim, who has been working on the proposal since February.
Yim said that there will be mainly four kinds of events shown on the television channel: student films and shows, recorded performances from student groups, lectures that students might be interested in and a possible news program.
Following suggestions brought up by USG members at the meeting, plans are now being made to create an online service that would make the various events available online to students.
The project is expected to get underway by late next year.
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