Early to bed

This page of The Daily Princetonian has a habit of attracting controversy: hummus, Public Safety, alcohol, Greek life, Bicker. But here’s a simple, fairly noncontroversial proposal: “Going out” to the Street on campus should start and end two hours earlier. It’s senseless for Princeton pregames to begin as late as 11 p.m. and for clubs to get crowded around 12:30 a.m. or 1 a.m. I’d wager that the principal cause of late-night social life here isn’t so much that we all love going to bed at 3:30 a.m. or 4 a.m. on Saturday nights, but instead that a collective action problem prevents us from admitting that we’d all rather be in bed by midnight if given the chance. And stops any one eating club from going off tap earlier than the rest.

For starters, the social schedule of Princeton eating clubs is highly anomalous, relative both to historical precedent and to trends at competitor schools. Several eating clubs officers who agreed to talk with me on the condition of anonymity confirmed that their graduate boards are baffled by the late hour at which Princeton socializing now begins; going to bed at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning would have been unthinkable two decades ago.

And over the past few days, I’ve taken an (admittedly informal and unscientific) poll of sociable high school friends who go to universities around the country (Harvard, Yale, Duke, Chicago, University of Florida and Michigan, just to name a few). The results, relative to Princeton scheduling, were surprising. Most of the high school friends I talked with aren’t any less socially active than the average Princetonian — in fact, many of them go out far more than I do (apparently Wednesday nights at Duke are a big deal). But when they do go to parties — at fraternities, bars, clubs or similar — they both start and end much earlier than we do.

Second, late-night partying takes a real toll on student productivity. The price of staying out late on Saturday night is starting work much later on Sunday morning. The hours between Sunday at 3 a.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. are a wash for most people I know. Wrapping up nights out at midnight — rather than 4 a.m.— would substantially raise the productivity level of students the next morning.

Finally, implementation would be fairly easy. Here are two ideas: First, clubs could collectively agree to go on tap and off tap earlier on Thursday and Saturday nights. Over the long term, the primary challenge to this solution would be a high risk of defection. There’s a flair associated with being out late, and if one club started staying open later than the rest, the ensuing brinksmanship would push the whole system back to square one. A solution to this would be to create a disincentive to defect: Any club that regularly stayed open (to nonmembers) beyond a certain hour (e.g., 1 a.m.) would have its officer Interclub Council privileges revoked by all the rest of the clubs. And there’s a role for the University to play as well: Dining Services could shut down pizza and grill service in Frist at 1 a.m. instead of 3 a.m. on Friday and Sunday mornings (messing with Frist pizza? I’ve got your attention now.)

To complement this policy, clubs could also start members-only activities much earlier to discourage members from going home in between the end of dinner and the beginning of a night out. The club that I’m a member of, Tower Club, has Pub Nights on Thursday night. Instead of sending the whole club home at 7:30 p.m. when Pub Night ends and then hauling everyone back out at midnight, Tower and other clubs could have members’ events at 8 p.m., go on tap at 9 p.m. and wrap up the entire evening by midnight or shortly thereafter.

There is a host of issues I haven’t addressed in this column — pregames foremost among them. But the point of this piece is more to start a conversation than to relentlessly advocate a policy proposal. And to be clear, none of the analysis here is meant to attack the club system — only to suggest that, insofar as an eating club system dominates social life on campus, nights out should both start and end earlier on Thursday and Saturday than they do in the status quo.

And really, we could all use the sleep. UrbanDictionary.com’s Word of the Day on March 20, 2011 was “pillow lust,” defined as: “That feeling that college students experience where they feel so exhausted that the idea of their face hitting their pillow sounds so utterly fantastic, it’s almost sexual.”