Why is this week different from all other weeks? Last year it had no special meaning; the first week of the second semester meant a return to classes after seven weeks without them. That is not the case in 2007, as many of my eating-club-obsessed classmates can attest. This is the week when at last, sophomores get to experience the full wonder and awe of Bicker and sign-in. These are abstract and vague fears to a freshman, events to be dreaded and met with trepidation, but to sophomores they are more real and somehow less scary.
I signed into Cloister Inn, so my Bicker experience has been wholly vicarious, but from my vantage point the actual experience of Bicker seems less daunting to my friends and roommates than I had expected. The consequences of the mostly innocuous activities, however, are immensely important and frightening. Nobody wants to be judged and rejected by their classmates, but at the same time, most of my friends realize that they lack ultimate control over the final decisions.
The bicker process itself, whether via interviews or games of some sort, has been well-received. Of the dozens of people I know who are bickering a club, only one has expressed anger over the process . While I am sure that, for now, some resentment and horror stories are hidden out of fear of retribution — or because no one has been rejected yet — the comments I have heard have been overwhelmingly positive or, at worst, neutral. Many of my fears from freshman year appear to have been unfounded, though I reserve final judgment until after membership decisions have been made.
Many of my friends who are bickering are also surprisingly upbeat about their prospects should they unfortunately be hosed. They realize that if by some chance they miss out on their club of choice, there are other options available to them. Hopefully, my friends who are strongly intent on one club can come to the same conclusion if things do not work out as planned.
The other options I mentioned now include the four-year residential colleges. I oppose the colleges for several reasons, the most important being that they are a direct challenge to what I see as the largely beneficial hegemony of the eating clubs in campus life. While administration officials can claim that they are "just adding options " and expanding choices, actions do not take place in a bubble. In a system that is to a large extent zero sum, changing the calculus of what is available will necessarily impact all aspects of social life.
I also strongly believe that the administration is not neutral on the question of which option students choose. If the administration were doing nothing but adding options to fill an unmet undergraduate desire, they would trust students to take advantage of the new options without coercion. There would be no need to "convince (students) to 'stay home' in the colleges."
In reality, there has been a huge effort to sell the colleges to a largely skeptical student body. I don't know a single person who is planning on joining a residential college, and neither do any of my roommates. My girlfriend was also unable to think of any prospective residential college members, and none of the random classmates I queried this week could think of any.
Though I assume that there are in fact 200 or so upperclassmen that plan on becoming college members as the administration claims, I haven't found any of them. This strongly suggests that four-year colleges don't have widespread appeal. It also suggests that the colleges will contribute to the stratification of campus life, as the students who do join will likely have little to no contact with me over the next two years. Finally, the decision to give a cash subsidy of several thousand dollars to students in the colleges while also subsidizing every student on a shared meal plan indicates a desire to have residents in the colleges.
Perhaps the student desire for four-year colleges is similar to the supposed enthusiasm for the changes to the Rocky and Mathey dining halls last spring. There, it seemed as if a deeply unpopular decision was made without consideration of student opinion. I can't shake the feeling that the colleges are symptomatic of the same proclivity to decide what is best for us based on preexisting administration desires — regardless of how we really feel. Barry Caro is a sophomore from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.
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