Durkee ’69: 8 clubs open to alternative system

Under the proposal Durkee discussed with club presidents in December, every student would be guaranteed a spot in a club. All students who participate in the selection process would be notified of their club placement on the same day, with students who bickered unsuccessfully placed into their highest-ranked sign-in club with available spaces.

Students who do not bicker would be placed into their first-choice sign-in club, unless the number of students who rank that club first is greater than the number of spaces available. Under that scenario, some of the students who rank that club first will be randomly selected for membership, and others would be assigned to their next-ranked club that has open spaces. Students would still be able to join sign-in clubs either individually or in groups.

“At this point it remains possible that the clubs would adopt an alternative process for this year,” Durkee, who chaired the eating club task force, said in December. He added that the proposal described in the task force report, which centered on a match system between clubs and students, is “now out of date.”

“We heard a lot of concerns for people who bicker and don’t get in and how painful that is, and the suggestion was that it would be a much better system if instead of getting a message that says you were not admitted to X, you got a message that said you’ve been placed at Y,” Durkee said.

Durkee said such a change is motivated by the goals identified in the task force report of minimizing the pain associated with being rejected from a bicker club and ensuring long-term sustainability for all the clubs, particularly sign-in clubs. “It’s a way to shift, in modest but important ways, the message you get if you’ve been unsuccessful in Bicker,” he explained.

But the fate of the proposal is still uncertain, and may not be instituted this year.

“At this point, eight of the clubs have decided they would like to try the process this year,” Durkee said, while “the other two may be interested in future years.”

It remains unclear, however, whether the change would be implemented unless all clubs decide to participate in a new system.

Interclub Council president Martin Scheeler ’11 said that it is unlikely that all clubs would come to a decision as to how the new system would be implemented.

Scheeler said in an e-mail: “The one thing that does seem likely at this point is that only a fraction of the clubs will participate in a changed system, if one is ever decided upon. Regardless of the state of the proposal, the clubs are all working as best they can to improve the club experience for both members and the broader University community.”

Charter Club president Justin Knutson ’11 did not comment on whether his club has agreed to the proposal. However, he said that Charter would “not endorse a systematic change unless it addresses the best interests of both the students and the eating clubs.”

Durkee said the proposal would not encourage students who would join sign-in clubs under the current system to bicker.

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“If you really want to be in an open club, you’re not going to want to bicker, because that’s going to make your first-choice open club the equivalent of a second choice, so I don’t see why anybody who now wants to be in an open club wouldn’t sign up for an open club,” Durkee explained.

He added that sign-in clubs would likely still hold events for students who sign in as their first choice during the week of Bicker. However, all students would officially become a member of the club at the same time.

“Everybody would come in on the same terms. It doesn’t change the fact that some of those students may have spent more of that week in that club than others, but they all come in at the same time, and there’s more of a feeling of ‘We’re all in this together,’ ” Durkee said.

In addition to easing the news for students who are hosed, the proposal is also designed to prop up sign-in clubs by encouraging membership from students who bicker unsuccessfully.

Durkee explained: “The number of students who are now in the clubs is probably enough to sustain over the long term about nine-and-a-half [clubs], probably not 10. But there are 10, and the evidence you see of that is for the last many years, there has been at least one club that really doesn’t have enough members to be sustainable long term.” All sign-in clubs have in the past 20–30 years been vulnerable, he added.