Princeton University just unexpectedly from the New Jersey plains like a caravan of Gothic camels on the Sahara. The whistle-stop location has its good and bad sides.

First, it means that if a student is interested in anything at all, he's got to be interested in Princeton. There's nothing else around. The result is one of the biggest displays of college spirit and confessed rah-rah-ism in the East: Princeton is one of the few places where over 300 persons will parade in a rally for the freshman football team.

But it also means that Nassau men are shut off from the outside world and the politics and girls thereof. Princetonians are notoriously blase to national affairs-their only political club is a half-hearted Liberal Union-and girls are rarer on the campus than born-rimmed glasses.

Princeton rah-rah is the kind of spirit that sends a student to cocktail parties wearing short plants and knee-length orange-and-black socks, or to a football game in a tatooed jacket depicting a man potted in an ash-can, with the motto, "Sic semper parti pooperus."

It is frankly admitted by the students and the dean's office, and is hallowed by age-old traditions like freshman dinks. It is memorialized each year by a "cane spree," which starts as a series of wrestling contests between freshmen and sophomores, and traditionally degenerates into free-for-all pandemonium.

Tiger Does the Polka

Rah-rah reaches its peak in Friday-night rallies. Nassau "P-rades" last almost two hours from the time they start on Prospect Avenue-Club row-to the time they swell into a crowd of (sincerely) cheering students on the steps under Blair Arch.

Waving red railroad flares, the marches set fire-to leaf-piles and maple trees to add to the gaiety, and chant the procession onto "Nas-sau Street!" As the crowd, now 1000 strong, juggernauts hand-in-hand down the thoroughfare, the band leader cake-walks and a masquerade tiger polkas with random dates.

At Blair Arch the rally crowd hears speeches every week from a whole first team-offensive or defensive. After last week's Rutgers parade, students cheered talks by eleven players and then demanded informal addresses from the sister of the offensive quarterback and the date of the second-string offensive wingback.

We'll Do Anything"

University officials do more than tolerate rah-rah-ism: last week Assistant Dean Lippincott told the Crimson "We'd do anything to get a more cohesive group." As an example, Princeton has never riveted down the clapper to the Nassaue Hall bell, which tradition decrees must be stolen annually by the freshman class. The class of '50 ran off with 40 clappers in their year, and each time the University bought a new one and tied it half-heartedly in place.

Two years ago, freshmen refused to wear their dinks and sophomores threw a barricade around the dining hall, refusing to let any dinkless yearlings by. For three bloody days the battle raged, while the University stood on the sidelines and applauded.

But the Deans know what they're doing. Princeton's classes emerge the most spirited alumni in the world, returning loudly each spring with firemen's uniforms and an occasional elephant--and new shekels for University coffers. Judge Harold R. Medina, a zealous reunion-booster, once appeared at an alumni festival in orange and black tights.

The administration's liberal outlook on class spirit isn't characteristic. Much to student annoyance. Princeton has a conservative Dean's Office that contrasts with Harvard's laissezfaire attitude toward students.

Princeton won't give students telephones without special permission; it band bars in dormitory rooms; it expels people for keeping cars closer than home: theoretically, a man from Los Angeles can't park an auto in Carson City.