Members of social life focus groups agree on pub

Two-and-a-half months after the establishment of the working group on campus social and residential life, participants in the separate focus groups organized by the working group agreed that reopening a campus pub would be a good idea, said Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69, a co-chair of the committee.

“There’s been widespread interest in thinking about reestablishing a pub,” Durkee said, explaining that the focus groups are currently discussing potential logistical issues, such as who would be admitted to the pub and where it would be located. The working group has not yet issued any formal recommendations, and Durkee said the group is on track to release its report at some point this spring.

Every focus group had at least one member of the working group present and several had two or three, Durkee said.

The University last had a pub in 2006, when it launched a series of pub nights in Chancellor Green starting in April. After the first of those nights, however, the University received a letter from the New Jersey Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control prohibiting it from distributing alcohol at subsequent pub nights. The pub was shuttered the following September.

Since the group was formed, it has launched a website soliciting feedback and completed 15 of 17 focus group discussions. These discussions included faculty, staff and students outside the working group. Students were randomly chosen and represented a diverse cross-section of the student body, including residential college advisers, USG members, fraternity and sorority members, and Interclub Council members.

Though the group plans to focus equally on all four areas, the pub discussion has taken up the least amount of time, according to both Durkee and Cynthia Cherrey, vice president for campus life and the committee’s other co-chair. “Everyone quickly agrees that they like the idea,” Durkee said, referring to participants in the focus groups.

The working group’s website, which it launched in late November, aims to solicit feedback from the campus community. “What we really want to do is encourage people to come talk to us about the questions we’re asking,” Durkee explained. As of Wednesday night, 49 people had provided feedback through the website, which the committee is using as another source to develop its recommendations.

“We’re continuing to collect data and then we will start looking at and analyzing it,” Cherrey said. The group will begin sorting through the data after winter break.

Durkee said that the group’s commitment to “take a step back at some point and look at broader goals” recalls the methodology of last year’s eating club task force, which ultimately issued recommendations that applied to areas beyond the Street.

“Whether out of this will come a need for another group, I don’t know,” Durkee said, who also chaired the eating club task force.

Aside from Durkee and Cherrey, the working group includes faculty, staff and students. All other members either did not respond to requests for comment or referred comment to the committee chairs.

Correction: A previous version of this article said that members of the working group on campus social and residential life had agreed together that a campus pub would be a good idea when, in fact, it was participants in separate focus groups who did.