University forms working group to study social life

The University announced the creation of a 13-member working group on campus residential and social life on Monday. President Shirley Tilghman charged the group with following up on the work of last year’s Task Force on the Relationship between the University and the Eating Clubs by soliciting opinions from diverse members of the University community.

“As was done by the Eating Club Task Force, I hope the working group will provide ample opportunity for members of the campus community to offer comments, perspectives and suggestions, and I hope it will be able to complete its work and issue its report during the spring semester,” Tilghman said in her instructions to the group.

Tilghman’s instructions identified specific topics for the group to examine, including social life in the residential colleges, the role of fraternities and sororities on campus, and the possible reintroduction of a University-operated pub. University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69, who is co-chairing the working group with newly appointed Vice President for Campus Life Cynthia Cherrey, said he considers the group’s mission to be broader than a simple investigation of these topics.

“I think we’re being asked to do two things,” Durkee said. “One is to review the University’s goals for undergraduate on-campus social and residential life. So that’s a broad question of, ‘What are the University’s goals?’ And the second part of the charge is to consider these more specific questions that are enumerated in the charge.”

In addition to Cherrey and Durkee, who also led last year’s Eating Club Task Force, the group includes six faculty members and five undergraduates. Durkee said the members were chosen to represent a “wide array” of perspectives; the undergraduate members of the working group include eating club members, residential college advisers and USG officers.

Unlike the member selection process for the eating club task force, the students on the working group did not apply for the position.

“The undergraduates were selected following consultation between the president of the University and the president of the USG, and what we were looking for were students that represented a diverse set of experiences on campus,” Durkee said.

“I’m looking forward to working with faculty and administrators and undergraduates on discussing some very pivotal issues related to campus life and impacting the undergraduate experience,” said working group member John Monagle ’12, who also serves as chair of the USG Projects Board. The other undergraduate members of the working group are USG vice president Sam Dorison ’11, Angela Groves ’12, Cesar Devers ’11 and Cameron Hough ’13, all of whom declined to comment.

Rounding out the committee are Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne; English professor and Rockefeller College Master Jeff Nunokawa; Christina Davis and Michael Olin, directors of student life at Whitman and Wilson colleges, respectively; English professor Robert Sandberg ’70; and Susan Teeter ’85, head coach of the women’s swimming team.

Nunokawa and Groves also served with Durkee on the Eating Club Task Force last year.

Durkee and Cherrey said the group will collect opinions from the University community and consult faculty members and administrators who oversee student life, similar to the approach of the Eating Club Task Force last year.

“We will probably create some kind of a website where we can invite anyone in the community who has thoughts to share them with us, but we also want to make sure that we’re talking directly with people who have responsibility in these areas,” Durkee said.

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Durkee said the questions the working group will address follow from suggestions raised in last year’s discussions on the role of the eating clubs in undergraduate social life.

“One of the recurring themes in the task force discussion was, you can’t think about the eating clubs and their role at Princeton without understanding them in the context of social and residential life on campus,” he explained.

Among the topics Tilghman instructed the working group to investigate was the possible re-establishment of a University pub. A University-operated pub, located in what is now the Chancellor Green Cafe, closed after the legal drinking age was raised to 21. Durkee said the idea of restoring the pub, which has been proposed multiple times in past years, came up often during last year’s task force.

“The suggestion was made, actually by quite a number of people, that if you had a location on campus where people could get together, where the drinking would be responsible, where the drinking would be in a context of conversation and perhaps food, and in a setting that encouraged moderation and responsible consumption, that might be a good thing, and it would be a way of modeling appropriate use of alcohol,” Durkee said.

The working group was also tasked with discussing the role of fraternities and sororities on campus. Although Durkee said he couldn’t predict what the group would find, Tilghman said the working group would likely be faced with few options.

“The options fall into three general categories: recognize the groups, ban them, or continue the existing policy on non-recognition,” Tilghman said in an e-mail.

Last May, Tilghman said that the administration would conduct a summer review of its policy on fraternities and sororities, outlining these same three options. On Monday, she described the formation of the working group as “the main outcome of the summer deliberations.”

Administrators said the time was right for the working group’s discussion, citing the recent completion of various projects geared toward improving student life.

“These questions are timely in part because ... the four-year residential college system is now fully in place, as are other recent additions to campus life like the Carl Fields Center and Campus Club,” Tilghman said in the group’s instructions.

Durkee said the working group represented an opportunity to expand on the work of last year’s task force to include more than just the eating clubs.

“The eating clubs are clearly an important part of the picture, but so is on-campus social and residential life, so is life in the colleges, so I guess this is really a chance to paint the rest of the picture,” he said.

— Staff writer Henry Rome contributed reporting.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article omitted working group member Cesar Devers '11.