Editorial: Alumni bicker at Cannon Club

It is widely acknowledged that the Bicker process in general is imperfect. Cannon’s proposed procedure exacerbates its chief flaws. Bicker tends to be a highly cliquey process: Bickerees are substantially advantaged when bickering a club that contains either their friends or fellow members of a student group who are usually sources of support during discussions. The fact that Cannon’s Bicker committee would contain so few individuals would substantially magnify this problem. Ten to 20 individuals will have a far more limited social circle than the full membership of an already active club, thereby sharply increasing the stratification between those with and without connections in the club.

Furthermore, Cannon’s current plan would require sophomores to bicker other sophomores, whereas sophomores are typically bickered by junior and senior members of a club. Under such a plan, obviously, those conducting Bicker are far more likely to be part of friend groups being bickered, further increasingly the cliquey nature of the process. In addition, being bickered by member’s of one’s own class might make the process more uncomfortable for many potential bickerees, and the sting of rejection is harsher when the decision comes directly from one’s peers. While juniors and seniors bickering clubs do regularly have this experience, it should be avoided whenever possible.

As an alternative to Cannon’s proposed procedure, the Editorial Board believes that club alumni should select the first class of members. Some might object that alumni are not as well equipped as students to pick new members of the club. There seems no reason to think that alumni would be a worse judge of character than undergraduates, though, and alumni will know better than current students how to successfully selecting an eating club class — after all, unlike the members of the proposed Bicker committee, alumni will actually have been members of an eating club. Moreover, there is no reason to worry that alumni are unfamiliar with the current character of the club — the club has no current character because it does not currently exist.

Under the current plan, alumni would already be involved in the Bicker process by selecting the initial bicker committee. Ultimately, it would be best if alumni put in the extra effort to manage the entire membership selection process for the club’s first class.