Whose campus is it anyway?

As a residential college adviser, I was well prepared for most of the questions my advisees and other freshmen I interact with ask me. I knew to tell them that yes, the fire safety presentation is mandatory, to explain how they go about signing up for classes, and, for my ’zees in particular, to inform them of the sad news about just how far the closest printer and laundry room are. But by far the most commonly asked question by every freshman I’ve talked to is one I am not quite sure how to answer: “Is the drinking culture on campus always like this?”

Each year, a thousand freshmen show up on campus and are convinced, from day one, contrary to our conversations about drinking and the Princeton social scene, that all people do at this school is party and drink to excess. And it wasn’t until I became an RCA that I realized a sizable chunk of that thousand are very conflicted by this. So many of them don’t want to go out but feel that they have to establish themselves on campus in these first crucial weeks. No facts (“the Street will die down after classes start!”) or figures (“Only 28 percent of students drink six or more days per month”) can dissuade them from the reality they are being presented by their peers. So though the answer to the question, “Is Princeton always like frosh week?” is literally easy to answer (in case you haven’t heard, “no”), for me it brings out the important question of, “Should Princeton always be like frosh week?” After grappling with this issue, I eventually resolved that upperclassmen should not be on campus for freshman week.

Coming to this conclusion is not easy. As an upperclassman myself, I realize how fun it is to be on campus with no commitments. I also understand that it’s important for freshmen to see campus as it is with all of its members, to begin to find their niche within the larger campus community. I think a compromise could be having half of freshman week freshmen-only, and the other half with all classes on campus. Though I am not sure exactly how this would work, I think it would be very beneficial for the freshman class, and through them all of us, to have Princeton to themselves for a time.

Coming from a small hometown where I hadn’t really met any brand-new people since sixth grade, I arrived on campus freshmen year not knowing a soul. But the beauty of Princeton is that everyone who shows up here knows no one or almost no one; that you can sit down in a dining hall with anyone that first week and no one thinks it’s weird; that you are able to completely create a new self in the face of people who are in turn creating themselves. Having the influence of the upperclassmen undermines this amazingly useful formative time, because most of them have already established themselves in their social circles and present to the freshmen a world where everyone knows who they are, what they want and what they do on a Saturday night (or a Tuesday night as the case may be).

Even now, as a junior, I felt like a bad Princeton student during last week’s Lawnparties for deciding not to stay on the Street after a lovely brunch at my club. It was an irrational thought, because I knew I wasn’t a fan of any of the bands or had even heard of most of them. Most of the people I talked to admitted that in previous years they had spent about an hour wandering from one club to the next before going home. And yet, the spirit of this place has taught me so strongly, from day one, that it is something that must be done on the first Sunday of fall classes and the last Sunday of spring classes.

What troubles me most is that this is an issue I didn’t see during my last two freshman weeks. I am afraid that all over campus, year after year, students are confronted with the party-heavy freshman week at the same time that they are confronted with everything else that’s new about this place and accept it all as the way things are. Too quickly and too deeply are freshmen assimilated into a specific social scene on campus, so they sometimes miss out on a chance to just be new in a new place with new people. Freshmen should be given a little breathing room to get a sense of who they want to be so that, when the rest of us make the long journey back to Old Nassau, we may each of us return to a social space in which we feel comfortable and that makes the most sense to us.

Luke Massa is a philosophy major from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.