"Shortly after that incident, the Princetonian reported, "the central head-quarters committee decided that too many people were on the porch without legitimate reason. They closed the doors and kept a careful tab on who went in and out. This immediately gave rise to the idea that the porch was a 'cage.' Even the men not in clubs began referring to themselves as 'cagers.'"

Around midnight, the clubs run out of liquor and every door on Prospect Street spews forth a jubilant stream of staggering sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Leaning on each other, singing, shouting, a few pausing at the gutter to retch quietly for a moment then loudly rejoining the buoyant inebriated throng, they totter off toward the campus or a cafe where they can calm down with a cup of coffee. The fraternal transport is now at its beatific height. Arm in arm they reel indifferent to traffic or the piercing cold; one lifts his hands to the frigid heavens and races down the street backwards, his scarf and topcoat wildly flapping in the wind, crying out in ecstasy, "Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord. Lord!" The unbroken tension of weeks--of a year and a half for some, has ended. Bicker is over at last, for them.

But Not for All

But on Ivy's back porch, for forty-two remaining sophomores, the suspense has reached its most pitiless climax. Since almost everyone who was inside has gone home now and the porch has long been growing chilly, the one-hundred percenters are permitted to move into the Ivy dining room. They can see the silver candelabras now and the rows of empty bottles. Prospect had electric lights and beer tonight. Somehow the number dwindles to thirty-five as the discouraging hours pass, then six give way and trudge toward Prospect, and another six are placed as a few clubs each make the sacrifice and each consent to admit one lone hundred percenter (there to be pariah or sycophant for who knows how long). Above, in the library, like secret Teutonic Norns, the ICC meets in constant absolutely closed session, omnipotently spinning fate. Below them, twenty-three one hundred percents remain, half of them Jewish. In Valhalla's lofty and concealed recesses, the list is gone over name by name: where are these to be placed?

An outsider observing Bicker finds it difficult to take the whole thing seriously. The enormous anxieties generated in every member of the sophomore class, the superficiality and downright silliness of its standards and ceremonies, the blatant injustices of the values and principles the system inculcates--all would seem ludicrous in any civilized community, but they are doubly comic when set in one of the nation's greatest universities and practiced by what is supposed to be a substantial segment of this generation's intellectual elite.

Democracy

At the heart of the system, unquestioned by even the hundred percenters themselves, lies the principle of selectivity. As a member of Key and Seal expressed it, "In a democracy we are supposedly free to become as exclusive or as gregarious as we like, and if in a club situation we choose to be exclusive, this is our privilege." From that bit of casuistry--more often expressed as an innocent belief that "you've got a right to choose your friends and the guys you're going to eat with--the code of values can be relentlessly deduced which summarily condemns certain personality traits, ethnic groups, and even scholarship, intellectualism, and originality themselves per se.

Apologetics

As David Riesman has pointed out, apologetics as a reaction to this kind of attack is inappropriate; "It surrenders the ethical initiative, for it permits the anti-Semite to frame the issue of debate and the norms of criticism." For to deny the fact that a Jew or a grind can't come up to country-club standards, is to concede the validity of those standards.

A truly liberal education should neither teach bigotry and prejudice nor try to persuade students of the opposite lie that there are no significant differences between men in terms of personality, conventional social charm, race, or religious conviction. Its task is rather to show that these factors have nothing to do with one's ethical worth or human dignity--to help the student remold his system of values so that none of these traits are the controlling factor in evaluating another human being--to deepen and expand his vision to the point, in fact, where he rejoices in human diversity and creative individuality and actively seeks it out. Social insulation, a striving for comfortable homogeneous groups, the frank institutionalization of arbitrary and unreflective prejudices--these do not contribute to that aim. Even if the racial criterion were eliminated, the general principle of an illfounded sort of discrimination would remain as an axiom of Princeton's entire social structure.

Respectability

Deeper insight than anyone has yet applied might reveal that the most unfortunate victims of Princeton's vicious Bicker process are not necessarily those scores of students who are dumped in undesirable organizations or left altogether out in the cold. Rather it is the hundreds who happily make the respectable and especially the most desirable clubs on the street. It is they who have consented without apparent compunctions to build their prestige, success, and social contentment on the hypocrisy, mendacity, inhumanity, servility, pettiness and sheer unreason upon which Princeton's club system and Bicker procedure are obviously reared. It's the oldest truth in creation that there is evil in the universe and it is as a realistic schooling in the world's folly and wickedness that Bicker is usually defended. In letting her students, after months of reading Plato and Kant, Milton and Thoreau, pass complacently through the two weeks of Bicker, Princeton may well be defeating her own highest efforts at cultivating an operative system of values, and inducing in her sons the refined sort of ethical blindness which tactfully refrains from seriously applying standards of what is right in adjusting to the realities of what merely is.

Harvard, however, has no grounds for a holier-than-thou attitude towards her younger sister in New Jersey. Woodrow Wilson, the first and greatest opponent of Princeton's club system, scribbled the following among his notes for an address in 1906: "What is the future of the Upper Class Clubs? More and more expense and only social aims or University aims? Danger that we will develop socially as Harvard did and as Yale is tending to do."

Freedom from Pestilence

Harvard's freedom today from the pestilence that still possesses Princeton should in no wise be interpreted as evidence for the stouter moral fiber of her undergraduate body compared to that encamped around Nassau Hall. It was only the House system which redeemed her--and a philosophy of education which viewed the student social structure as a primary concern and area of legitimate jurisdiction for a great university and which sought to rebuild that structure on a principle which was the inverse of selectivity: the principle of distribution within the House, geographical, academic, economic, and intellectual, with diversity of race and religion being considered relevant only insofar as they are eagerly sought after, never forming a basis for exclusion.

It was just such a goal that Wilson campaigned for, decades before President Lowell was to demand it in Cambridge. And the same elements which finally defeated him in 1908 would be sure to oppose vigorously any similar move by President Goheen to abolish the clubs fifty years later.

'Associate With a Mucker'

The alumni organized meetings of protest. One of the leading graduates of Princeton wrote to the Alumni Weekly denouncing the idea that students should be compelled to mix with their inferiors--"no one can make a gentleman associate with a mucker." In the pages of The New York Sun, an indignant letter signed "Ivy" appeared, demanding to know "Is it possible that the doctrines of the confiscation of property and the superior wisdom of those in high places which have recently been so characteristic of our political life are to be received with favour in one of the most historic and conservative of our institutions of learning?"

Then -- as now -- the overwhelming majority of the faculty favored the substitution of "the college plan" for the club system, and the great masses of Western alumni also supported Wilson's efforts.

But the Eastern alumni through the