More than 40 people turned out Friday for the kickoff retreat of a student group aimed at improving race relations on campus in what club officers described as a promising start to the year.
In a series of discussion groups led by trained moderators, participants in the Sustained Dialogue Frist Campus Center retreat identified self-segregation and the language barrier confronting international students as problematic aspects of the University social scene.
"In terms of numbers, we were targeting to make four discussion groups, and we got it," said Sustained Dialogue president Tyler Kuhn '06. "Participants got excited. It was amazing that for a two hour-long retreat, we had almost everyone there for the entire time."
The group, which was forced to close by organizational problems last year, invited the co-founders of Sustained Dialogue's Princeton chapter — Teddy Nemeroff '01 and David Tukey '02 — to the event on Friday.
Tukey, the retreat's featured speaker, said the group was founded in a spirit of idealism.
"We all want to leave the world a little bit better than we found it," he said.
The student group is affiliated with the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, a tax-exempt umbrella organization that produced the promotional DVD shown at Friday's event.
The Institute was founded by Harold Saunders '52, who helped negotiate the historic Camp David Accords as an assistant secretary of state under President Carter.
The distinctive format of Sustained Dialogue discussions, which are always moderated by either a trained student or an administrator, is based on Saunders' philosophy of conflict resolution.
The DVD shown Friday featured members of the Princeton club, as well as members of the University of Virginia chapter, whose officers met with their Princeton counterparts to suggest approaches to reorganization.
"We used some of those ideas to bring it back here," publicity chair Stephanie Tung '07 said last week.
The club's officers said they weren't expecting 45 students to show up to Friday's event — but they didn't mind the surprise.
"We are very pleased," Kuhn said.
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