The youngest, the cheapest, and the shabbiest of the clubs is Prospect. It is also the most democratically governed. Founded ten years ago, Prospect is unique in demanding neither undergraduate nor alumni dues, and its term rate is eighty dollars less than that of Tower and a hundred and thirty dollars less than Ivy, which otherwise represent the two extremes. More important, Prospect is unlike the other organizations on Prospect Street in that its policies are not determined privately by a small clique of officers and a powerful graduate board. Alone among the clubs, Prospect can hold the sort of Bicker its members actually want.

This year Prospect announced that any sophomore who wished to join might do so by simply dropping in and signing the books, until either its capacity had been reached or the official deadline arrived. Isolated idealism of this sort, however, was native in a situation so inherently unprincipled at its roots. The thousand and one vices and foibles of the system have long been concealed by the democratic boast that "everyone who wants to, makes a club." Jim Ridgeway, chairman of The Daily Princetonian, published an editorial warning Prospect that its policy would prove disastrous, that one club would be used as a scapegoat and dumping ground by the irresponsible other sixteen, who could then continue the old boast without themselves doing a thing to achieve it. As a result, the Interclub Committee summoned Ridgeway and his managing editor to their meeting place in the library of Ivy Club, hotly denounced them both for "incompetence," failure to "cooperate," a "negative" and "critical" attitude, and formally broke off all relations with the Princetonian.

Without once making specific criticisms of what had been written or charging factual inaccuracies, the ICC banned the press from all further Bicker events and information. Every one of Bicker's key decisions was made in personal anonymity and behind closed doors. The demands of the newspaper for an account of what was going on were flatly rejected, and the all-powerful ICC opperated throughout without being responsible to anyone, least of all to either the administration or the student body of the Princeton community.

Bicker reaches its colorful climax during Open House.

Seven-thirty that Saturday evening and the entire class, bathed, brushed, shined, combed, and shivering, hurries through the dark night and biting wind across the campus to Prospect Street, where the grounds of sixteen plush clubhouses--and the not-so-plush Prospect Cooperative Club--stretch before them. The luckiest ones have received several bids, and join one of the big five:

You stroll with anxious expectation across the broad lawn up to the great white columns of Colonial's porch. The door swings open and you and your group (throughout Bicker, you move in a group of three or four--you are judged, accepted, and perhaps rejected collectively) are swept into the dazzling warm uproar inside. You feel the soft depth of the rug beneath your feet and can see a bright, glittering, well-groomed haze all around you. Up the grand stairway, lined with upperclassmen clapping and cheering, until you reach the top where beaming and blushing abashedly you sign your name and receive the dark blue and red and yellow and green striped club tie from the president. A final huzzah then you and the rest turn with relish to the serious business of the evening, consuming as much alcohol as possible. Everyone is shaking hands and slapping each other on the back. It is a bacchanalian love-feast and you drink freely. You are in.

Others, the majority, must accept bids to lesser clubs, and others still must go through the agonizing process of rushing from house to house, hoping to be accepted from the second list after all their more desirable classmates have signed the books. When at last these too are in, they drink still more freely and shout more loudly--trying to forget, though they are in, how it was they got there.

The Others

And finally there are the Others--those who are "in trouble," as the euphemism goes, who must somehow be fitted in somewhere by somebody so the clubs can again point with pride to the precious statistic of 100%--"100% of those wishing to join a club did so"--the number by which alone the system can be justified. It must be able to claim the fact of 100%, no matter how often or how strangely 100% must be re-defined.

A council of the club presidents, the ICC, directs all one hundred percenters to report to the back porch of Ivy at 9:30 sharp (oh heavy irony here, on the back porch of Ivy, entering not the front door or being admitted to the parlor, but stumbling through the dark around the carousing house, and coming in through the servants' entry.)

At first they joke about their predicament (but actual tears will be shed before many hours have passed)--"I'd feel pretty bad if I didn't see so many of my friends here." Kind soft-spoken Ivy men take them aside and counsel them. Join Prospect, they gently urge (each adjusting his identical green and yellow striped tie). Join the poverty-stricken cooperative where you'll take turns waiting on your own tables and mopping the floor and be looked down upon for three years by the members of the real clubs. Join the work club, join the club for left-overs, and (ever so gently) hurry up about it, so we can show 100% and go back to the party. Resistance is firm, but in many cases gives way. Something in you resists being classified a wonk, but something deeper cries out against exile.

The Wonk

What constitutes the Princeton definition of "wonk" at Bickertime? The traits of a varied species can be most clearly grasped when combined into an extreme, idealized archetype, whose full obnoxious character each empirical individual but partially manifests and only for a brief time. To apprehend the Platonic essence, then, of the utter antithesis to the approved club type, imagine an inarticulate, introverted, morbidly shy sophomore from a small town in the provinces. He wears outlandish ties, dirty sweaters, and baggy pants. Not only lacking a crewcut, he is in bad need of a barber nearly all the time and obviously shaves but rarely. Until he arrived at the university he was educated in mediocre public schools, the whole of life to him lies in doddling with mathematics, and his idea of kicks is playing the violin. He is too undersized for athletics, has a horror, in fact, both of sports and drunken manly rough-housing, and his table manners, to put it kindly, are native. The girls he dates when he dates at all are dogs, his conversation, when he talks at all, is incessantly intellectual and hardly what the New Yorker call "sophisticated." Besides being childish ignorant of his own inadequacies and ineptitudes, moreover, he wears thick glasses, has a large nose, and is flagrantly Jewish. None of the hundred percenters on Ivy's back porch were in so repugnant a state as this; even the sorriest of them participated in only a few of the characteristics of such an ideal form, and then in an attenuated degree. But one can clearly see why a social club would only be sensible in excluding such an individual, whatever the wisdom might be of admitting him to the university, and most of the officers on Prospect Street would agree that this precisely describes the sort of man who must at all costs be kept out. It is also a fairly accurate portrait of Einstein.

Here the stigmata, the brand, the taint, are clearly seen: the error of wearing white bucks for so solemn and evening, the misdemeanor of a soft, stammering voice, the felony of too loud and sure a one, the atrocity of a blue suit, here sitting a couple of silent boys with slanted eyes and yellow skin, from here the man who was academically first in the class leaving in discouragement to join Prospect, and here, recurring nearly two times out of every three, Israel's immemorial face is seen; the class has sixteen Merit Scholars, ten were in trouble on Thursday night, and five of them, too, are here.

And when they're sure you're not an unctuous agitator for Prospect Club, they are willing to talk to you freely, gather, gather around and tell you calmly about the first fight at the meeting when Court Club decided to cut its Jewish quota in half because an unintentional influx one year was causing its prestige to flag; about what an ICC president told one of them privately and with a certain sadness one day, that "anti-Semitism in the clubs is something that can neither be exposed, nor proved, nor cured"; about the tacit and explicit demands of club alumni through the graduate boards that, though a few Jews may be admitted to every club, "they must be kept down to reasonable numbers" and that is why Prospect has so many Jews; about what a club representative had just told one of them quite frankly, "we'd like to take you but our quota on you people is filled up"; about--