Give back Whig Hall

The administration wants to create alternatives to the Street. Whig-Clio wants to remain relevant on campus. Here's my solution: the University ought to transfer Whig Hall back to the Whig-Cliosophic Society, give the keys to the building to the Society's president and let Whig-Clio run and regulate itself like it successfully did for the first 175 years of its existence.

The rise and fall of Whig and Clio are fascinating stories that tell the history of the University in microcosm. Founded by James Madison, a member of the Class of 1771, among others, the two societies were, for a long time, the center of extracurricular life at the University. While Princeton's curriculum was devoted to Latin and Greek scholarship, Whig and Clio provided an outlet for students to learn modern history and debate current events. Evenings and weekends were spent in the Society's buildings eating, reading in their libraries, participating in organized debates and critiquing other society members' papers and speeches.

The modernization of the University's curriculum and the creation of the Wilson School robbed Whig and Clio's once-unique niche of educating Princeton students in current affairs. In addition, with the rise of the Street and intercollegiate athletics, students were now offered extracurricular options other than the two Societies. Membership dwindled, and a budget crisis forced Whig Hall and Clio Hall to be transferred to the University with the agreement that Whig Hall would be set aside for the Society's use.

Today, some of the subsidiary organizations of Whig-Clio still flourish. The Princeton Debate Panel is an unqualified success, recently fielding a team that became the top-ranked intercollegiate debate team in the nation. Most of the other organizations and the Society as a whole, however, struggle to attract interested members. Many students fill out membership forms at the beginning of the year, pay their dues and then drop out of Society life except to compete for the Prize debates once every semester.

Whig Hall is chronically underutilized. Though it has a big-screen TV, a pool table, a computer cluster and many study spaces, its rooms are often empty. Compare that to the pool room in Tower or the TV room in Colonial, where people are hanging out at nearly any hour of the day. Why is that? Most people have to walk much farther to get to the Street than they would to get to Whig. Yet they do so because they view their eating club as their own place — a student space operated by fellow students — and not a common area controlled by the University. Anyone who spends much time in Whig is liable to lose his study space to a French precept, or, should he be watching TV in the Oakes Lounge past 11p.m., to get kicked out when Public Safety comes through to lock the doors.

Turn Whig Hall back over to Whig-Clio. Let the Governing Council in connection with the Alumni Board decide on hall rules and arrange for janitorial service and security. What sort of changes could we expect to see? For one, students would feel more at home in a building devoted solely to their use. I would also anticipate that the alcohol policy would be relaxed. Whig-Clio could regularly offer alcohol at its gatherings and rely on a wristband system like the one used by the eating clubs to keep underage members from obtaining alcohol (wink wink).

The biggest criticism of this proposal that I foresee is that it would turn Whig-Clio into a farce. Some may suggest that Whig-Clio would devolve into another eating club, and members would show up for the beer and forget about the enlightened discourse. I don't think that this would actually happen. The Debate Society at the University of Toronto (2006 World Champions) and the Oxford Debate Union (2005 World Finalists) have actual bars in the basements of their on-campus buildings. The bars attract new members, bring back alumni and give current members another reason to relish the time spent with their Society. Yet, even in the presence of the bars, these same members continue to succeed at the highest levels of international competition. If Princeton were to return ownership of Whig Hall to Whig-Clio, then the Society could reestablish itself in its original role as not just the center of political debate on campus, but also as the hub of a student's social life as well. Jason Sheltzer is a sophomore from St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at sheltzer@princeton.edu.