Cannon graduate board reviewing applications

With construction running ahead of schedule at what is soon to be the newest club on the Street, the graduate board of the Cannon Dial Elm Club has begun reviewing the applications of potential members with the goal of selecting the Bicker committee before the end of the school year.

The club announced to The Daily Princetonian on March 11 that it would reopen as a selective eating club in February 2012. On March 20, just before students returned from spring break, all members of the Class of 2014 received an email from Cannon Dial Elm Club encouraging them to fill out a membership application.

Since then, according to graduate board chair Warren Crane ’62, over 100 freshmen have submitted applications. Including students who are listed on an application as a member of an ironbound group — a group of between two and 11 students that bicker together — but have not yet submitted an application, the potential number of applications received totals about 160.

“We’re going to be oversubscribed, and we’re going to have some unfortunately difficult choices to make as to who gets offered admission,” Crane said. The application students received in their inboxes said the club expected to accept 110 students next year, give or take 10 percent. As in other clubs, the new sophomore members would receive a reduced meal schedule at the club during the spring semester, with two meals per week.

Because Cannon currently has no undergraduate members, next year’s sophomores will conduct Bicker for members of their own class. The Bicker committee will consist of 10 to 20 members who indicated a high degree of enthusiasm in joining the committee on their application. In addition, the application contains a section for applicants to list students other than those in their ironbound group with whom they would like to be in a club, and Crane said names that reoccurred on this list would be strong candidates for the committee.

“If Sam Brown is named on 20 applications as being somebody that person would like to be in a club with, that tells us that Sam Brown is probably someone we’re going to want to have on our Bicker committee,” Crane said.

Joe Goss ’14, who is applying for admission to the club as part of an ironbound group, said that, in many of the ironbound groups, only one member indicated interest in the Bicker committee.

Some of the students who sent in applications early have approached the graduate board about helping spread the word around campus and ensuring that the application process runs smoothly. Goss ’14, who started an open Facebook group called “Cannon,” which currently has 96 members, is among these students.

“That’s helped us organize the applicants so that we all have an idea before we go in who’s going to be joining with us, who’s interested,” Goss said of the group. “If you’re starting a new club, the main risk is that you’re going to join and your friends aren’t going to join.”

Goss created the group in early March, before the rest of the student body received the application. He then added 15 members to the group, all of whom are members of the varsity football team along with Goss. Since then, membership in the group has branched out, and Goss stressed that anyone in the freshman class was encouraged to join.

“There was no target audience,” he said. “The people who took the initiative just happened to be athletes. The makeup of the club is just a result of the people who took the initiative to show their interest early ... It really is a club that’s open to everybody, it’s just whether people think they’re going to be able to fit in with the group that showed that initiative.”

Both he and Crane said that the graduate board did not reach out to any particular students to encourage them to join and that all students helping to organize the club’s opening approached the graduate board themselves.

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Crane emphasized that the applicant pool thus far is diverse in terms of interests and backgrounds. He said that the applications he has received include a sizeable amount of people involved with the theater community, the orchestra and chamber choir, the ‘Prince,’ the WPRB radio station and men’s and women’s teams.

Nevertheless, Crane said he wanted to ensure that members have enough in common to “create a culture that can be built on.”

“The number one critical objective is to get a group of members next year who are good citizens, who generally have some homogeneity to them so they can get along,” Crane said. “You have to expect that the following year, the people who would be likely to be interested in joining here will be people who have similar interests and objectives as the people who we’ve already selected.”

Goss said that what he and the people with whom he is working are trying to do is “[take] different members of different clubs who normally might not hang out and [put] them together.” He added that many people who submitted applications come from groups that normally hang out in Tiger Inn, Cap & Gown or Cottage. “You don’t want to have to pick where you go each night based on who you want to hang out with, and there’s going to be a good mix of people from different social areas,” he said.

Though Crane said he was initially opposed to accepting juniors and seniors, he said he is now considering granting social memberships to upperclassmen. Part of the reason for this, he said, is to ensure that the club — which will have three tap rooms and a walk-in freezer with room for 30 kegs — has enough members who are of the legal drinking age.

“We would like to take enough juniors and seniors so that we’re not that different from the other clubs in terms of how many people are of age and how many are not,” Crane said.