Orange Key tours gloss over life on the Street

From Firestone Plaza to Prospect Garden, Holder Hall and Blair Arch, Orange Key tour groups of prospective students and parents traverse campus several times per day, hitting many of the University’s most important landmarks, with one exception: the Street.

Orange Key, Princeton’s volunteer tour guide service, has been taking prospective students and parents around campus for almost 75 years to view dormitories, dining halls and athletic facilities, but the tours never go to Prospect Avenue to view the eating clubs.

“Guides have to convey to visitors in a relatively short amount of time what the eating clubs are all about,” Orange Key guide Keith Hall ’10 explained, adding that he tries to give an overview of the clubs on his tours. “I explain that they have social events and community service projects, that they participate in intramural sports and that no, they are not ‘co-ed frats.’ ”

Though independent from the University, the 10 eating clubs on Prospect Avenue are the home of dining and social life for the majority of upperclassmen. Since they are not actually shown the Street and the 10 eating clubs on it, visitors’ knowledge of the clubs comes solely from what their guides tell them during the campus tour.

Orange Key president Emily Silk ’10 said that though each tour is unique, tour guides generally try to address the four main dining plans that students can subscribe to: eating clubs, co-ops, residential colleges and independent living. She added that many guides tell their groups that eating clubs attract the majority of students, but most guides do not dedicate a larger part of the tour to discussing them than they do to any of the other options.

Some guides incorporate their own personal experiences with eating clubs into their tours.

“I talk about how my specific experience at Terrace [Club] has in many ways mimicked my experience in Mathey in the sense that it has provided me with a sort of family within Princeton, without which the campus might have seemed quite large and daunting,” Hall explained.

Several tour guides also said they generally tell their groups that the eating clubs also have a social element. Silk explained that she tells prospective students that the clubs host campus events on weekends and that students often go there to hang out.

A small amount of information about the clubs is available through the University’s undergraduate admission website, which states, “Eating clubs serve the campus community and the greater Princeton community through initiatives such as tutoring underprivileged high-school students for the SAT, running college-application workshops for local students and organizing clothing and canned-food drives.”

But students deciding whether to attend Princeton are often only able to learn about the Street by word of mouth from friends and Orange Key guides. Based on the limited information they are given and the unique nature of each tour, prospective students seem to form varying opinions of Prospect Avenue and its role in Princeton’s social scene.

“The tour left me thinking that eating clubs fill in for Greek life at Princeton and that most people are involved. But based on what we were told, I’m not crazy about them because they sound exclusive and cliquey,” noted one prospective student who took a campus tour last week.

But a high school senior on another tour said, “The eating clubs seem very unique to Princeton, and it’s easy to see that each one doesn’t feel isolated from the rest.”