Exclusive college meals spark debate

Dinner was a little different in Whitman College last night. The dining hall — like an eating club — was members only.

Officers standing near the entrance passed out Whitman sweatpants, and a jazz band added atmosphere to the dinner, which had a menu including steak and salmon. The tables were covered with white tablecloths, and an ice sculpture of the college's shield sat nearby the dining room's tall stone fireplace.

It was Whitman's first College Night, envisioned by the Whitman College Council as a weekly tradition for people in each residential college to eat with one another every Monday. Though Whitman was the only college open only to its affiliated students and faculty, the other five also participated in the night, offering a little bit more than a typical Monday dinner.

Reactions to Whitman's new weekly dining event were generally positive. Fiona Chan '11 said that she loved the dimmed lighting, while Tricia Tsai '11 said she particularly enjoyed the jazz band.

Butler College had an Italian-themed night with special Italian entrees, free T-shirts and keychains and a karaoke machine. Wilcox hosted the student band Funkmaster General, while Forbes' dining hall presented "The dINNer," which featured candles and white tablecloths. At the Rocky-Mathey servery, the food was the same as usual, but both dining halls had entertainment — techno DJs in Rocky and a jazz band in Mathey.

In Butler, Sukrit Silas '11 "love[d] the cheesecake and the free stuff," he said. "I think College Night is going to stick around because the food is good." But another Butler student, Nikhil Trivedi '11, was not as satisfied. Though he liked College Night, "I [got] the feeling that Whitman's is a lot better," Trivedi said. "I think that's evidence of the inequalities between the college budgets, and I don't think that's right because we all pay the same to go here."

The College Night idea was proposed by the Whitman Council as a way to increase interaction within each college's community and the event intended for each dining hall to admit only members of that college.

College Night posters listing the six colleges with the words "Members Only" were released, though only Whitman was ultimately "members only" last night.

Other college councils were uncomfortable with the idea of exclusive dining hall meals.

"We weren't so sure about it," Wilson College Council president Conor Pigott '10 said. "It seemed like we were cutting people off from meeting others, rather than giving people a chance to meet more people. We're fine with having a special night, but we knew from the beginning that we didn't want it to be exclusive."

Pigott added that a members-only event would not be "useful" in Wilson. "There's a lot of spirit here already, and we don't want to take away a place for people to meet everyone."

The Forbes College Council officially rejected the idea of limiting last night's dinner to Forbesians because of concerns about fairness, convenience and food quality, said Waqas Jawaid '10, the council's secretary. "Though we appreciate the merits of such a night, we don't appreciate the exclusivity." Jawaid is also a cartoonist for The Daily Princetonian.

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Whitman College Council chair Chip McCorkle '09 said in an email that "members" was "just a term of convenience, meant to include all the nonresident parts of a college — upperclassmen affiliated with (but not living in) two-year colleges, faculty fellows and faculty advisers."

But Jawaid said that the term smacks of the exclusivity of a "Bicker eating club, when residential colleges are supposed to provide an alternative."

Another member of the Whitman council, Bud Grote '08, said that the council was just trying to build an identity for the college. "Everyone in Whitman is new," he said. "We just want to give people a chance to get to know each other."

"We considered exclusivity very carefully," he said. "We don't want to think of this as an event that excludes people. We want to think of it as something that brings the community together."

College Nights, he said, are intended not just for Whitman, but for all colleges "as an opportunity for each college to build community."

Most of the councils approached College Night optimistically. Pigott said that Wilson's open event "could be a good thing for Wilson College. It could bring people from all over to Wilcox."

Butler College Council president Joe Vellone '10 said that Butlerites were excited about College Night. "We're glad to have a chance to interact with all the people who live in [our] college, and we're particularly interested in getting upperclassmen who used to be in Butler to come back to Wu," he said, adding that he thinks Whitman chose to adopt the once-a-week members-only policy to cope with overcrowding in the dining hall.

"Usually the overcrowding doesn't bother me," Whitman student Nicholas Persaud '11 said, "though it gets annoying when the card machines get backed up."

Another Whitman student, Awais Tariq '11, suggested that a better solution to overcrowding "would be to increase the Whitman seating area or make food better at other dining halls."