Two years away

To decide how Princeton undergraduates can best experience residential life, German professor Michael Jennings and two colleagues went on the road.

Last summer, inside one of Harvard's 12 houses — the residential hubs for sophomores, juniors and seniors — Jennings entered a dining hall bathed in natural light and chose from small platters of food cooked within the last 10 minutes.

"These dining spaces and systems were just so different from Princeton's," Jennings said. As the master of Rockefeller College for eight years, he was used to eating in a massive, orange-lit dining hall after choosing food from large platters.

Jennings is leading the way to the future of Princeton's undergraduate residential and social life. As the chair of the Dining and Social Options Task Force, he's searching for the best dining and social experiences colleges offer so Princeton can borrow from them when it opens four-year colleges in 2007. Starting with next year's class, the University will begin phasing in a 500-student increase that will finish in 2010.

Last summer's research took Jennings to seven colleges across the country, from Yale to Stanford.

His 15-member task force, appointed by President Tilghman in September, has equal numbers of professors, administrators and students. The task force expects to issue its recommendations by July.

These recommendations are already beginning to take shape. For 100 years, since Woodrow Wilson 1879 failed to create a residential college system, the University has tried to foster a more intimate dining and social atmosphere for all students. That has usually included attempts to make the social experience less reliant on the eating clubs, which at least 75 percent of upperclassmen join. Now, as in the past, such moves are causing a stir on Prospect Avenue.

Still, the task force aims to bring freshmen through seniors together by focusing campus social life on the residential colleges rather than the Street. Jennings said the new dining halls should dramatically improve the quality of food at Princeton, offering "some of the best places to eat in the country" in a more comfortable environment. The days of swiping a card to gain entrance to a dining hall may be past, perhaps replaced by a point system like the one used in Frist Campus Center.

With that increase in quality, the University envisions underclassmen and upperclassmen dining together in more versatile facilities with tables for intimate conversation or group meetings. All students will retain an affiliation with a residential college under the new system, and the University hopes some upperclassmen will hold joint contracts with clubs and colleges.

The University will move upperclass advising into the colleges so that juniors and seniors can continue their relationships with college masters and directors of study. Some college trips also will focus on careers and graduate schools for upperclassmen in addition to the trips to Broadway that underclassmen take.

A result of the move to include upperclassmen into the college system might be their spending less time at the eating clubs. The University administration has long had mixed feelings toward the clubs. While many students enjoy the system, the University administration worries it may be off-putting for too many.

The clubs have "served the University well," Vice President for Campus Life Janet Dickerson said. However, current and future students "need an alternative that is not club-based. We need to rebase, recenter social life."

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"The basic problem with the colleges was, at some point in the sophomore year, the way that Princeton social life and communal life is set up, joining a club means being mature, growing up," Jennings said, referring to sophomores participating in club sign-ins or Bicker in the middle of sophomore year.

"It leads to this peculiar rupture in Princeton's undergraduate life between upperclass and underclass life," he said.

On Prospect Avenue, some eating club leaders are concerned about the impact of a new system. Jamal Motlagh '06, chair of the Inter-Club Council (ICC) and president of Quadrangle Club, said he's worried about "financial problems for the clubs created by the four-year colleges, both in reference to general membership drops, and in regards to the University's aim for some sort of half membership."

While the University currently estimates that fewer than 100 students will leave the eating clubs for the colleges, Motlagh says that what will ultimately happen is unclear. Some students who joined the clubs just to be with friends might elect to join the colleges or hold a joint contract instead.

"The student body's interest in the four-year colleges as a whole will determine if this drop in eating club membership is dangerous to the stability of one or more clubs," Motlagh said.

Administrators acknowledge that the new system will have an impact on the clubs. There is talk of opening a bar in Chancellor Green or a substance-free club on Prospect Avenue. A club might even close. They say, however, that all changes are consistent with an effort to make more students feel comfortable.

"It isn't [the University's] intention for the clubs to close," Dickerson said.

"It's part of what makes this place Princeton for many students. But it's also part of what makes some students feel marginalized or excluded here," she added, saying the clubs are "disproportionately white and wealthy."

Fourteen percent of white students consider their experience with the eating clubs negative, while 22 percent of Hispanic students and 30 percent of black and Asian students describe their experiences as negative, according to the 2003 Princeton Experience Survey of the then-senior and sophomore classes. But, overall, 60 percent of undergraduates classify their experiences with the Street and the clubs as positive.

Dickerson called the club system a "peculiar and unusual culture," saying that the selective Bicker process is "unusually harsh" for students who are rejected from clubs.

Surveys of students seem to suggest varied feelings toward the club systems. In exit surveys of seniors, a quarter of seniors said they were very happy with upperclass dining options, 50 percent said they are satisfied and 25 percent are extremely discontented.

The University does not expect a great change in club and college choices because of the additional 500 students, Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee '69 said. The new colleges will have room for 300 upperclass students, about 250 more than currently live in the two-year colleges.

"The four-year colleges are not an attack on the Street, nor will their existence have much impact on the Street," said task force member and former Colonial Club president Tracy Solomon '05.

But eating club leaders remain worried about the impact of the new system, she said. Sign-in club presidents are concerned about the prospect of fluctuating membership numbers.

"It's a little bit scary from the perspective of the president of a sign-in club," said Colonial Club president and ICC vice-president Katie Daviau '06, who is also The Daily Princetonian's director of sales and advertising. "Our memberships fluctuate a lot from year to year, and I don't want to see Colonial or any other club go under now or in 10 years."

Some also fear a loss of tradition. Daviau added that while the colleges will broaden available options, they will never be able to replace the clubs.

"When I meet someone who went to Princeton, there are two question that I first ask to get an idea of what their life was like here," she said. "What did you major in — or what was your thesis on — and what eating club were you in. The four-year colleges will never replace that kind of tradition." She predicted that the selective Bicker clubs would be less susceptible to changes.

No Bicker club president would comment for this article.

Brian McKenna '04, ICC adviser and former Cloister Inn president, said the clubs would be able to work with the University to maintain tradition."The officers understand the importance of this issue for both the clubs and the University as a whole and are dedicated to making it work for both," he said.

University administrators have been meeting with club officials to hash out ideas. In late February, Tilghman met with current and former eating club presidents, task force members and McKenna to discuss her ideas of a hybrid club-college dining plan.

"We are trying so hard to find a way of working with the clubs to try to find a way which will enable the juniors and seniors within the colleges to have something like a dual or joint membership between the colleges and the clubs," Jennings said. "We're not even close to [it] right now either on the University side or the club side. But we're working hard on those aspects, and I'm really an optimist."

Fundamentally, administrators think it is important for upperclassmen to join the residential college system because upperclass-underclass contact is currently too limited.

"From the introduction of the residential college system, some [underclass] students have expressed greater desire to know more juniors and seniors," Durkee said. "And the same is true the other way around — some upperclassmen want to be able to get to know more freshmen and sophomores."