At first glance, the problem of hallway clutter would not appear to be of global significance. After all, we are not even likely to trip on the ubiquitous campus publications, takeout menus, flyers for various dance performances or invitations to an eating club's latest themed party. But the bottom line is that somebody has to pay for printing and cleaning up the mess that is inevitably left behind, and in the end students — and our fine Building Services staff, with their backs hurting for life — are the ones who foot the bill. There is also the question of the clear-cutting of Brazilian forests needed to produce those endless pages that get stuffed under our doors at night.
So what do our neighbors to the north do to handle this environmental, aesthetic and economic mess? Yale has taken a few steps to finding a solution by requiring that publications, flyers and advertisements be placed in students' mailboxes rather than left outside their doors. Another alternative would be for the University to place drop boxes on the door of each dorm room. This would at least improve aesthetics and reduce the workload (and costs) of those employed to dispose of litter. Short of doing all this marketing through email (with options to filter what you don't want), a reasonable solution, implemented by a certain school in the Boston area, would be to put a laminated board on each box, enabling students to place check marks next to the materials they wish to receive outside their rooms (such as campus publications, advertisements, flyers, etc.) This cuts down on clutter and waste, as demonstrated by the Eco-Reps' tent display on the north Lawn of Frist Campus Center, should be abhorrent to all.
This is not a call for Princeton to adopt Harvard's arcane academic distribution requirements, or re-institute Early Decision. But we do urge the administration to make one easy early decision: Move to adopt Harvard's mass-mailing distribution requirements and cut back on dormitory litter.
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