Immediately after finals--this year on Thursday, January 30, the Bicker committees of the clubs start to make their calls. These calls continue for ten days. Classes resume not long after Bicker has started, but they are largely ignored, sophomores finding it "hard to read anything more advanced than Peyton Place."

The committees call between the hours of four and six in the afternoon at first, then between seven-thirty in the evening and midnight. On the basis of a few minutes of stereotyped small talk the committees rate the eligibles, and the clubs immediately begin cutting their lists, most "from the top" as well as "from the bottom." Each night fewer clubs come calling at a given room. If, on the last night of the Bicker period, a sophomore is still receiving a committee, he has probably procured a "first-list bid." If not, and he has good friends whom a certain club is anxious to have, he may receive a "second-list bid" that will get him in if they accept their first-list bids, or if not enough first-list men accept that club's bids to fill its "section." Some sophomores receive bids from a number of clubs. Others receive none at all.

Individual sophomores are associated together in complexes of friends known as "preferentials," all of whose members desire to remain together with varying degrees of zeal. The exigencies of Bicker force most of these preferentials into greater or less states of disintegration, a process which widely subjects old friendships to severe strains and sometimes even shatters them. A sophomore's preferential group may also be used by the clubs to appraise and manipulate him throughout the Bicker procedure.

Saturday afternoon at Holder Court, club representatives and hundreds of sophomores shivering in the icy wind stand with hands thrust in pockets or holding frigid beer cans, grouping and regrouping, talking in fast desperate undertones, trying to bargain friends into the same group, unload undesirables elsewhere, bid a sad goodby (as if parting forever) to classmates joining other clubs:

"Well, best of luck, Chuck." (wet eyed and swallowing hard) "I'm sure sorry you and George won't be going with me into Cannon."

"Ted's in trouble. He hasn't a bid yet. If you'd only turn down Tiger, Eldon, the two of us could get him into Charter."

"Hell, I hope Braddock does go to Key; I always thought he was a bastard anyhow."

Holder tower looms high above the thick mud that clogs the cordovans and white sneakers. "Named in honor of Christopher Holder," the plaque reads, "a member of the Society of Friends in America in the seventeenth century, devout, loyal to duty, patient in suffering." Gargoyles leer down at the spectacle over the cloister arcade and from a phonograph stuck out the second-floor window of four entry the voice of a rock-and-roll singer blares fortissimo:

"Ain't That A Sha-a-a-ame!"

There is a definite hierarchy among the clubs at Princeton which is universally acknowledged, though the caste structure obviously implied by it is widely denied to exist. The highest echelon consists of "the big five." Ivy Club (wryly called "The Vine") is at the absolute summit; then follow, in no particular order, Tiger Inn, Colonial ("The Pillars"), Cap and Gown ("The Cap"), and Cottage ("The Cheese")--among whose former members have been both F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Foster Dulles. Graduates of the most famous Eastern prep schools, the scions of stock hallowed by generations of fame and money, and other individuals who can sell themselves well in fifteen minutes or so, are nearly assured admission to one of these. To make Ivy is social apotheosis.

Then follow the host of "middle clubs," subject to gradation among themselves no doubt, though here any explicit ranking would be less objective and not generally conceded: Campus, Cannon, Charter, Cloister, Court, Dial, Elm, Key and Seal, Quadrangle, Terrace, and Tower. Dial took this year's only Negro.

Certain stereotypes are associated with some of the clubs which, like all stereotypes, fail in many individual instances. They are, however, more reliable, on the whole, than the images connected with the respective Harvard houses. Thus, the campus "doers" or activity men are apt to be found in Cap and Gown or Quadrangle, and athletes tend to turn up, according to their inmost natures, either in Tiger Inn, the lair of "the gentlemen jocks," or in Cannon, home of "the sweaty ones." The captain of this year's football team, however, is in Ivy, which always has its pick of the entire class.

Sharing the bottom of the social scale with Prospect Club--though ranking, if possible, even further down--is Woodrow Wilson Lodge, or, as it is commonly called, "the facility." Wilson Lodge was founded last year by the University and supposedly provides "an alternative to the club system" for those who want neither to renounce all social activity for three years of college life nor to pass through the indignity of Bicker and accept membership in one of the seventeen eating clubs. But any one in the university, with the possible exception of the administration, will freely admit that the three-room facility in no sense provides a satisfactory alternative.

Last year, in an attempt to raise Wilson's prestige, Sophomore Vice President Robert Hillier dramatically announced that he would accept no bids from any club, but would join the Lodge and bring "sixty or seventy of the good men in the class" along with him. "Everyone's afraid that the facility will become a dumping ground," he stated. "Someone has to make the move to destroy the stigma that will result." Today, Hillier has become a junior member of Quadrangle Club, there are only twenty-one people in the facility, and it, along with Prospect, is a dumping ground.

Prospect Unique