Princeton men are complacent. They come to the grassy Gothic place ready to accept things as they find them.

"Of course there's no anti-Semitism in the clubs," the chairman of the Daily Princetonian told me last week. And nearly everyone else at Princeton agreed. In fact, they were indignant that, I should even ask such a question. The year of the anti-Semitism scandal at Princeton was 1958, when the wire services made it front page news in every paper in the country. But that is all over now. At least it is all over according to club rhetoric.

One-Half Jewish

But the truth is that about one-half of the Woodrow Wilson Society -- the University's alternative for people who don't want to join clubs or can't get in--is Jewish, while the average club is about ten per cent Jewish. And bottom clubs have far more Jews than top clubs.

In 1958 the Interclub Committee (ICC) issued a statement that read: "The ICC recognizes the right of every club to be selective. Selectivity implies the right of a club to impose a religious quota, if it so desires." But this is no longer the case, everyone at Princeton will tell you.

Jews are probably not as actively discriminated against as they used to be. How much discrimination there is during Bicker (when the clubs choose their new members) is impossible to say. But the fact that five times as many Jews join Wilson as join the average club is significant and exposes the exclusionist nature of the club system.

Princeton's clubs stand for homogeneity, moderation, good will, and selectivity. Many of the University's Jews find it impossible or hypocritical to join that kind of exclusionist system. They tend to be more liberal than other Princeton men, and the system appears immoral to them. So many of them choose not to join. Others, faced with the prospect of landing in a bottom club, decide not to join. One Wilson man pointed out that there is a high proportion of math and science men in the bottom clubs (and sociological studies bear him out): "Many Jews are math-science men, and they don't want to be in bottom clubs, so they join Wilson."

The club system creates its own antisystem, centered at the Wilson Society. A disproportionate number of Jews belong to that anti-system. But Jews are not the only outcasts.

The Wilson Society was founded by President Goheen in 1959 because of pressure caused by the '58 scandal. Unlike the clubs, the Society is wide open. Anyone can join, and today there are close to 200 members. Juniors and seniors eat together in Wilcox Hall. Even freshmen and sophomores can join and take advantage of the club's extensive activities--concerts, film programs, playreadings, partying and speakers. The Society's members are far more active than club men, whose activities are limited to partying and eating.

In its seven years of existence Wilson has undergone a metamorphosis. It has become as much a closed society as the clubs are. But ironically, the Wilson members are bound together by their fervent opposition to the isolation of the club system. Wilson's president, Dan Altman, says sarcastically, "To an outsider, this insularity is childish nonsense--to us, it is a way of life, 'the Princeton experience.'"

Pancho Villa

Altman, an articulate senior with a Pancho Villa mustache, was one of the founders of an experimental college at Princeton this year. Again, its founding appears to be a reaction to Princeton insularity. About half the students at the experimental college are Wilson Society members. The Society last year withdrew from the Gentleman's Agreement, which governs club parietals and drinking. Altman says the Society withdrew "on the theory that, in return for a facesaving agreement for the University, which can wave around a piece of paper upon which is written, 'I will be a good boy,' it offers students little besides paternal rules and offers officers the opportunity to enforce them for the Dean."

The exclusionist club system has created this strange situation, by which all the Wilson radicals are herded up to Wilcox Hall to grow angry with the Princeton way of life and yet let their own Society become insular. Nearly all Wilson members are of this outcast variety. They care very little about actively participating in changing the system. Instead of providing the nucleus of this year's revolt, they were repelled by it. The club system is an incredible joke to them, too trivial to bother with. So they left the revolt to the campus leaders--club members who were involved in the system and wanted to change it. Not radically, now. Just an adjustment in Bicker.

Altman is quite explicit. He says that there can be no real social and intellectual diversity at Princeton until: "1)there is a decent proportion of women students on campus and 2) the administration decides to muster up its courage and to spend a good deal of money on imaginative solutions to Princeton's social problems. There is no reason to believe that any such changes are in the works. The nation that students are going to come up with the answers to these problems in their spare time is at best an unrealistic expectation, and at worst, a surrender to the programming of Princeton's Alumni Inertial Guidance System, which keeps us safely on course and out of harm's way--the twentieth century."

There are several reasons why the Bicker revolt failed this year. Altman mentions the administration and the alumni, and they are both a very large part of it.