Cannon Club to admit juniors, seniors

Cannon Club, which is set to reopen as an undergraduate eating club in February 2012, will now be offering social memberships to members of the classes of 2012 and 2013. The Graduate Board of Trustees of Cannon Dial Elm Club announced the news in an email sent out to juniors and seniors on Aug. 15.

When Cannon first announced that it would reopen last March, graduate board chair Warren Crane ’62 said that he was not planning on offering membership to upperclassmen, mostly because he did not want to cause harm to other clubs on the Street if their members chose to leave for Cannon. But by the time the Cannon board began reviewing applications from the Class of 2014 last spring, Crane had begun to consider the idea of accepting juniors and seniors as social members, he said.

“We’ve been contacted by a number of juniors and seniors,” Crane told The Daily Princetonian last spring. “While we still feel that we’re not likely to be able to start the school year by feeding them, we think that we may well be offering social memberships to people who are juniors and seniors.”

Crane had said that most of these juniors and seniors who had initially contacted him were not already members of an eating club, and he said on Wednesday that the majority of members who are hoping to join in the spring are unaffiliated.

Originally, Cannon had been intending to enroll approximately 110 members of the Class of 2014 for this coming spring, but practical reasons and the desire to fill the club to its capacity led Crane to expand the club’s membership size by welcoming students from the junior and senior classes.

“We viewed the situation from two perspectives,” Crane said. “One was the capacity of the club, how many members it could accommodate and recognizing that the Class of 2014 would not fill out that capacity. Secondly, we want to have members of the club who are 21 years of age.”

Last spring, Crane acknowledged that the desire to have members who could legally purchase alcohol was a reason he was considering admitting upperclassmen.

“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.

Crane noted that he had already received many applications from upperclassmen, including over a dozen from seniors who would only be able to spend one semester in the club.

Though both the email sent out by the club’s Board of Trustees and the accompanying fact sheet make a distinction between “social members” from the junior and senior classes and members from the Class of 2014, there will be effectively no difference between the two different types of memberships. The social members will pay the same fee as the admitted sophomore members — an amount that the fact sheet claims will be similar to the fees that the other bicker clubs charge sophomores for the spring semester.

Additionally, juniors and seniors will be entitled to two meals a week throughout the spring 2012 semester, as will sophomores. Members of the Class of 2013 will be able to become full members and take 19 meals a week at the club beginning in fall 2012. Upperclassmen will also be able to serve on the Bicker committee, which Crane had previously said would be made up entirely of members of the Class of 2014.