Prospect St. at night is magic. Fifteen Victorian mansions line the street, glowing gold from their windows. Princeton men in v-neck sweaters and blue button-down shirts walk down the sidewalk in groups of three or four. A few groups peel off at each building: Colonial, with its high pillars; Cap and Gown, with its Tudor facade; Ivy; Tower Cottage. It feels like someone should be humming "Going Back to Nassau Hall" in the background.

Inside the clubs, the Princeton men sit at round tables and are served their vegetable soup by Negro servants in white coats and black bow ties. A servant calls a club man "Mr. Bradley," and a club man calls a servant "Thomas." After dinner, the club men retire to their walnut-panelled parlor to talk, smoke cigars and sip coffee. Then they wander off to the billiard tables downstairs or to the studies and library upstairs. Everything is refined and muted and comfortable.

But some people want to change all this. Mostly they are dissatisfied with Bicker, the ritual by which the clubs choose their members from the sophomore class each year after January finals.

This year the revolt against Bicker failed. The great monolith was too entrenched. A group of ten of the biggest men on campus got together and tried to budge it. They included the president of the Undergraduate Council, the chairman of the Daily Princetonian, the president of the Orange Key Society, five other club members and the secretary-treasurer of the class of 1969. It didn't take them long to find out that the club system with its 90 years of tradition was not about to be moved.

This year's revolt was the seventh major one in the system's history. All of them have been gentlemanly uprisings because that is the way things are done at Princeton. That is what all that walnut paneling does to you.

Nobody thought of activism or picketing or confrontation. What the ten-man committee wanted was rational discussion of issues in a calm, gentlemanly way. In November they issued a 16-page pamphlet entitled "Report on Bicker and Proposals for Change." It outlined their ideas for changing Bicker and told why they wanted it changed. It influenced a lot of people. The committee took a poll and found that a little less than 40 per cent of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes agreed with their proposal.

But the clubs were the key, and the clubs turned it down.

Bicker is a frightening and trivial experience. Almost everyone who goes through it says that. For six nights each sophomore is interviewed by representatives from all the clubs, who visit him in his room. If he's good, the sophomore will get eight or nine bids to join different clubs. If he's not so good (according to the clubs' scale of "coolness," as the system's opponents call the criterion), then he will get just one or two bids, or maybe none at all.

Inevitably, someone cries, someone gets irreparably hurt. On Open House night, everyone but the 30 or 40 who don't have bids yet boozes it up happily. It can be a very bad scene. Locked away in a room in one of the clubs, the members of the sophomore Bicker committee (top sophomore class members) and the Bicker, chairman from all the clubs get together to try to put everyone still bidless in some club. One Colonial man, who was a member of the sophomore committee last year called it "a very terrible thing. People were just casually trading off other human beings as if they were cattle. You know, I'll take this one if you'll take those two."

The idea is to achieve 100 per cent Bicker -- everyone who signs up for Bicker is supposed to get into a club. Last year only one Princeton man didn't make it. He seemed resigned to his fate. He had effectively rejected the system and even developed his own rational. "The clubs strike me as being an escape hatch, as being void of any kind of reality. The idea of being buddy-buddy just bothers me," he said.

The one who didn't make it--a music major from St. Paul's--is now a member of the Woodrow Wilson Society, the University's alternative to the clubs, which was established after the anti-Semitism scandal of 1958. If a Princeton man doesn't want to go through with Bicker or becomes dissatisfied with the system he can join Wilson or he can go Indepndent and eat in his room or in the town. The Wilson Society costs $830 to join, including board and fees. Most of the clubs cost over $1000. An Independent spends $400-$500 on food.

More than 90 per cent of the upperclassmen belong to clubs. Clubs are for eating, partying, talking, and little else. One club--Tower--sponsors speakers and discussions, but none of the other clubs do anything like that.

There is a clearly defined hierarchy at Princeton, and everyone knows about it. Especially blind dates from Vassar. There are also rigid stereotypes, and for the most part they hold. Ivy men are the aristocracy. Tiger and Cannon men are jocks (Tiger is for gentleman-jocks). Cottage men are campus leader types. And so on for all fifteen.

The present Bicker system, by which the clubs pick the sophomores they want, perpetuates the hierarchy and the stereoyptes. Bottom clubs are forced to "top cut"--not give bids to campus big shots they know will opt for one of the top five (Cottage, Ivy, Cap and Gown, Colonial, and Tiger Inn). The top clubs are pretty well assured of getting the men they want, and during Bicker they send out their best members to get the desirable sophomores.

The committee that drafted the new Bicker proposals objects to the system's selectivity. "Built upon the selecton process, the hierarchy is the testament to the ethic generated by Bicker--the nebulous concept of 'coolness,'" the proposal reads. What the committee wants is a system similar to Harvard's House application system. Sophomores would list their first three club preferences, which would be respected as much as possible. The effect, of course, would be to make the clubs far more heterogeneous. The proposal would destroy the hierarchy, and a lot of the trauma of the Bicker ordeal. But it would also create a kind of club system a great number of Princeton men would not want.