Campus pub suggested during CPUC meeting

University officials formally discussed the findings of the Working Group on Campus Social and Residential Life at the Council on the Princeton University Community meeting on Monday.

While the meeting drew a standing-room-only crowd after the University announced that the working group would recommend a ban on freshman-year Greek affiliations, University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69, who co-chaired the working group, also discussed the variety of other recommendations the working group had proposed to increase the sense of community on campus.

“For a University that is so fabled with the incredible sense of connection that alumni get after they leave, many students said that they don’t feel that same sense of community while they are here,” Durkee explained.

The group recommended a combination of large- and small-scale activities to increase on-campus socializing, including a concert at the football stadium with headliner talent, an all-student dance and an annual “birthday party” for the University sometime around Oct. 22, the anniversary of the University’s 1746 charter day. The group also suggested the formation of a University-wide “snow day,” to create what the report referred to as “unstructured socializing.”

Durkee also discussed a program that would organize times for freshmen to have dinner with the people who occupied their rooms in the three previous years. This idea, which is modeled after a tradition at Oxford, is meant to be a way to “engage across the classes with people you normally wouldn’t have an occasion to connect with,” he said.

The working group also recommended the reinstitution of a campus pub. Though only those over the drinking age would be able to purchase alcoholic beverages — which the group expects to include a “range of beers on tap and wines of good quality” — any student would be allowed to spend time in the pub and purchase food and nonalcoholic beverages.

Though the working group’s Campus Pub Committee expressed a preference for a “purpose-built space,” Durkee said that the expense of such construction made it more feasible to convert an existing space into a pub. The most likely possibilities for venues include the downstairs tap room at Prospect House and Chancellor Green Cafe, Durkee said.

The University formerly operated a pub in Chancellor Green until 1982, when the state of New Jersey raised the drinking age to 21.

Durkee emphasized that all of the working group’s recommendations were just ideas and that the actual implementation will be at the discretion of the relevant departments, such as the residential colleges, the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students and the USG.

The working group was commissioned by President Shirley Tilghman to examine ways to enhance University social life, partially in response to questions raised by last May’s Task Force on Relationships between the University and the Eating Clubs. The group met 11 times, conducted 17 focus groups, and sifted through over 300 comments submitted to its website.

At Monday’s meeting, Durkee, who was also the chair of last year’s eating club task force, discussed the implementation of the task force’s recommendation for a more formal system of notifying students about their club placement.

He said that the proposed computer program, which would allow students to immediately learn of sign-in club placement if they are rejected from a bicker club, had been tested and seemed to work without flaws.