When the last class of First College first-years moved out in Spring 2022, they bid their dorm rooms farewell forever.
In anticipation of the residential college’s impending demolition, some saved a brick from their building, marked their favorite bench, or signed their names underneath their common room’s stairwell, former First resident Sarina Hegli ’25 recalled.
This spring, those students graduated as members of Yeh and New College West (NCW), and the construction of Hobson College is underway on the central grounds where First once stood.
“Now people ask where First College is, and you just point to the hole that’s missing in the middle of campus,” Hegli said.
“We’ve retained the First College jacket, and that’s lovely, but I feel like there’s a lot that was lost about First that didn’t need to be,” she said.
As construction continues on Hobson College, located on First’s old grounds, the Class of 2025 was the last generation of Princeton students to live a full year in First’s aging brick dorms. The first step in Princeton’s modern residential-college system, First has been a site of community — and controversy — since its start.
Recollections of First
First College began as Woodrow Wilson Lodge, a group of a dozen members of the Class of 1959 who sought to “to provide a place where individuals … could be accepted for what they are and not forced to conform to the narrow specifications of Bicker.” They dined in a small facility adjoining Madison Hall (now Rockefeller College).
Wilson Lodge Members gather for a game of cards in Madison Hall in March of 1959.
The Larry DuPraz Archives
In the fall of 1960, Wilson Lodge members moved into newly constructed Gauss, 1937, 1938, and 1939 Halls. Dodge-Osborn Hall opened its doors later that year.
By the time the Class of 2025 moved into First, the room conditions were a source of much derision. To a survey question from The Daily Princetonian about the worst parts of First, several respondents listed housing-related troubles.
“There were many bugs everywhere and no air conditioning during summer,” Thomas Verrill ’25 wrote. Harris mentioned spider and centipede infestations, and Bryce Springfield ’25 wrote that the dorms were “built like ovens.”
“In general, the dorms were musty,” Verrill wrote.
Springfield also noted “depressing architecture and interior design.” Adrian Moreira-Behrens ’25 recalled “the old wood floors,” and Basha Waxman ’25 mentioned “the orange brick.” Meryl Liu ’25 likened the architecture to that of a prison.
“First was always thought of as the worst residential college and dining hall of them all,” Springfield recalled.
Some had indeed criticized the architecture of First’s original halls at their opening, displeased that the buildings could “be turned upside down without changing the skyline or external structure.” Still, the rooms themselves garnered more positive reviews back then. In a 1960 ‘Prince’ Survey of New Quad residents, the question, “How do you like your rooms?” yielded answers “rang[ing] from ‘great’ to ‘absolutely unbelievable.’” Professor James W. Smith ’38 commented that the rooms were too plush.
Since then, the college has remained famous for its large suites, including the infamous 12-person “Zoo.”
“The fact that we once had seven, eight, and even 12-person dorms on this campus still boggles my mind,” Cassandra Eng ’25 wrote. “As someone who lived in a seven-person dorm as a freshman, I was lucky that my roommates were awesome — some of them are still close friends. Others weren’t so lucky.”
Paige Sherman ’25 appreciated the sense of community that her freshman year’s eight-person suite provided. She has lived with two of her suitemates every year since, and she shared that others have stuck together, too.
Some of the First College spirit came from a sense of solidarity, according to Sherman, and some came from the college’s centrality.
“First was … probably the most central residential college, which almost made up for the bad parts,” Verrill wrote.
This centrality made the dining hall a hotspot despite controversial food, according to Sherman.
“People like to talk badly about Wucox dining hall, but … when the 12:20 classes let out, everybody ate there,” she said.
Sherman and others remembered the dining hall’s pasta bar fondly, as well as nighttime study sessions at its booths.
“The Wucox dining hall on the Butler side had a really nice, college-y vibe to it, and especially late at night with people working in it and eating the leftover pastries/cereal from earlier in the day,” Verrill wrote.
“There was kind of a familiar stickiness to the tables in there,” Hegli said. “You just knew that if you put a notebook down, you were gonna rip the last page off.” Since First’s demolition, Hegli has spent her dining hall visits exclusively at the Butler extension of the Whitman dining hall, where she said those sticky tables now reside.
For study spots, Waxman and others also cited the Julian Street (“J-Street”) Library, housed in Wilcox Hall.
Likewise in Wilcox, students could access a beloved dance studio and black box theater.
“The Wilcox Dance Studio was one of the best dance spaces on campus,” Eng wrote. “Its gorgeous wood-paneled floors, large windows that let in natural light and welcomed a gentle breeze at night, and its central location made it hard to beat.”
First’s central quad also garnered several mentions.
“There were some really beautiful spaces in the courtyards throughout the residential college, which were great when the weather was nice,” Emma Mohabir ’25 wrote. Moreira-Behrens and others mentioned the sand volleyball court in particular.
“I’ve missed having a res college that really felt like an enclosed community, with all the buildings centered around a beautiful quad where anyone could enjoy time outside,” Abigail Rabieh ’25 wrote.
Abigail Rabieh is a former Public Editor and former Head Opinion Editor for the ‘Prince.’
These common spaces built a strong rapport among members of First.
First at First: An “opportunity for rebellion”
The dining hall, the central quad, the overlapping social spaces and dormitories — both beloved and panned by students today — were once the source of a gradual revolution in Princeton social life.
Woodrow Wilson Lodge’s choice of name carried deep symbolism. Fifty years prior, Wilson — then president of Princeton — had called for a “radical reorganization” of Princeton undergraduate life, in which “residential quadrangles or colleges, each with its own dining hall, common room, resident head of college, and resident preceptors” would replace the clubs and integrate students’ social and intellectual spheres. The University’s trustees had rescinded support for the plan after resistance from the clubs and alumni.
“In the old snooty days — something like the ’20s, ’30s and so on — [Prospect Street] really had an absolute stranglehold, and a very snobby one, on undergraduate social life,” said John V. Fleming, Master of Wilson College (which became First College) from 1969–1972 and 1989–1997.
Sociological shifts after World War II changed this inertia. The student body diversified following the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, including larger numbers of public school graduates, as well as older and married students matriculating after wartime deferrals.
Students again protested exclusionary practices in the club selection process. In 1950, nearly 80 percent of the sophomore class signed a petition demanding that all bickerees receive bids. Then the “Dirty Bicker” of 1958 violated this “100-percent bicker” policy, with 23 students — more than half of whom were Jewish — left out of the clubs.
National uproar followed — as did Princeton undergraduates’ desire to find social spaces outside of Prospect Avenue. Sophomore class secretary Darwin Labarthe ’61 joined Wilson Lodge that December, and within the next year, nearly 10 percent of the sophomore class had followed suit. Labarthe was elected junior class president soon after.
This “fifties’ social problem” created demand for the first instantiation of Wilson’s “quadrangle” idea: Plans were put in place for a “New Quad.” Wilson Lodge members would be eligible to move into its “somewhat modernistic” rooms of Gauss, 1937, 1938, and 1939 Halls in the fall of 1960.
In the summer of 1959, a sketch of the New Quad anticipates the dorms serving as an alternative to Prospect Street.
The Larry DuPraz Archives
Meanwhile, Wilson Lodge had added a program of faculty fellows, contributing to the group’s “unsnobbish and intellectually stimulating atmosphere.” The group renamed itself the Woodrow Wilson Society in January 1961 and began dining at an “ultra-modern” Wilcox Hall that fall. Wilcox Hall’s undergraduate-run Julian Street Library was meant to “stan[d] for the ideal of Woodrow Wilson, bringing together the social and intellectual life of the students.”
The group continued with the spirit of providing an alternative social space. When five women registered to spend their junior year in Princeton’s Critical Languages Program in 1963 — nine years before women became eligible to earn Princeton undergraduate degrees — they received an invitation to “take their meals” with the Wilson Society.
The women faced “heavy dating pressure” from the outset. “We plan to have a ceiling of two dates a week, but of course this will vary depending on how much work we have,” student Barbara Alpern told the ‘Prince’ at the time.
Still, three women accepted the invitation and began dining at Wilcox Hall.
In the meantime, more Wilcox-adjacent housing came with the completion of a so-called “New New Quad” in 1964.
Wilson’s vision advanced further in 1967, when Professor Julian Jaynes, Master of the Woodrow Wilson Society from 1966–69, called for a “residential system for the quadrangle similar to the Yale system,” proposing “the establishment of a residential ‘college.’”
The Woodrow Wilson Society became Wilson College, Princeton’s first residential college, with membership open to all four classes.
Wilson College students would continue to innovate, leading seminars and creating a “Knight School” in the early 1970s that offered training in “auto mechanics, bartending, drawing, music theory, baking, foreign languages, bicycle repair and maintenance, [...] bridge,” and even “predicting the future.”
“There was this countercultural, outsider sort of fringe to being a member of Wilson College for a lot of people,” Fleming said. “It was an opportunity for rebellion. It was an opportunity to opt out of social rituals that you might not be interested in.”
Wilson College’s legacy would also develop via the expansion of the residential college system.
In 1970, Princeton Inn College (now Forbes) joined Wilson College as Princeton’s second residential college. In 1982, a controversial plan for five underclass residential colleges took effect, with the “New New Quad” becoming Butler, and the up-campus Commons and dormitories becoming Rockefeller and Mathey.
Wilcox gained the new neighbor of Butler’s Gordon Wu Hall, the other half of “Wucox” today. (The ‘Prince’ reported on 8 a.m. construction work and other “hardships” Princetonians were “forced to endure” for the benefit of future classes.) Then Wilson expanded further with the addition of Feinberg Hall in 1986.
Despite pushback, a four-year residential college system would eventually come to fruition. In the 2000s, Whitman, Mathey, and Butler became the four-year corollaries to the two-year Forbes, Rockefeller, and Butler, respectively. Then, all colleges transitioned to four-year in the fall of 2022.
By then, Wilson College had become First College.
Racial reckoning and First’s farewell
During a 2015 sit-in protest in Nassau Hall, the Black Justice League called for (among other demands) the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from both the residential college and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on account of his legacy regarding race.
In response, the University Board of Trustees convened a Woodrow Wilson Legacy Review Committee.
Professor Eduardo Cadava, Head of Wilson College from 2009–2017, assembled an ad hoc student committee to consider the fate of an enlarged photograph of Wilson on Wilcox College’s wall. Cadava and the committee came to regard the photograph’s “size and prominence […] as ‘unduly celebratory’ and not in keeping with the spirit of Wilson College’s founding wish to have Princeton be a place that is truly diverse and inclusive, and one that embraces, respects and values all its members.”
The photograph was removed in the spring of 2016.
Wilcox’s walls would welcome something new in the spring of 2022: a photo exhibit of the 1964 Princeton Summer Studies Program (PSSP), curated by students in an effort to “show the long journey of Princeton coming to terms with its relationship with race.” A model for the national Upward Bound program, PSSP had invited 40 public high school students — 30 of whom were Black — to spend the summer taking classes at the University while living in First’s 1937 Hall and dining in Wilcox Hall.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2020, the Trustees removed Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs and gave First College its name “in recognition of its status as the first of the residential colleges that now play an essential role in the residential life of all Princeton undergraduates.”
“I was always incredibly proud of that, because First College was founded by students, for students,” said Professor AnneMarie Luijendijk, who was Head of the College during the transition from Wilson to First — and who is now Head of NCW.
Eng similarly wrote in her survey response, “I carry a sense of pride in having experienced a part of Princeton’s history by living in its first residential college.”
“Maybe the beauty is that now we sort of all share that legacy,” Luijendijk said. She pointed to Residential College Advisors and Peer Academic Advisors as two groups helping to carry out First’s student-driven spirit.
Luikendijk has also seen positive changes since the Fall 2022 move from First to NCW. Regarding her own role as Head of College, she appreciates NCW’s Jones-Feliciano Head of College House for its proximity to student life, in comparison to the Prospect Street house she occupied as Head of First. This proximity facilitates eating with students in the dining halls and makes group dinners and tea hours in the House more convenient for students.
She brought up NCW’s Coffee Club, state-of-the-art ceramics studio, and dorm-adjacent common spaces as assets to NCW’s community offerings — not to mention the air-conditioning.
“I’m happy the next group of Princeton students will be able to live more comfortably in NCW, Yeh and Hobson,” Lauren Harris ’25 wrote.
Still, some of the last First graduates take preserving the bygone college’s legacy seriously.
Hegli, for one, misses Wucox and hopes the Hobson dining hall will give students the sense of community Wucox gave her.
“Crazy to think I was the last to live in the famous Zoo dorm and all those memories are now gone with a new building in its place,” Moreira-Behrens wrote.
“It’s bittersweet to be the last group of people to remember a piece of Princeton history,” Harris wrote, “but that place was in need of a serious remodeling anyway.”
Helena Richardson is a staff Features writer for the ‘Prince.’
Please direct corrections requests to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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