When Altman talked to President Goheen about the University spending more money to change the club system into something more equitable, he got the answer, "Well, you know we're a poor University." As absurd as it seems, Goheen has a point. He seems to be disillusioned with Bicker. He told a Princetonian reporter in November: "There are no valid ways to make sound judgments...people turn to extraneous, superficial things...Students lose their sense of fair play and good sense in Bicker." But Goheen is not willing to sponsor a wholesale change in the club system, or even publicly state that he is dissatisfied with Bicker.
The clubs are privately-owned, and the University has no real financial control over them. That is again the club rhetoric. Actually, the University is not neutral at all. It could exert a great deal of control over Bicker. Right now it provides financial aid for clubs with money trouble, uses its offices for Bicker registration, oversees the Gentleman's Agreement, and gives scholarship aid to club men even though their board costs twice as much as an Independent's.
The University could use financial pressure in some of those areas or it could simply forbid students to join clubs altogether and institute something like Harvard's House system. Or it could publicly express its distaste for the present system. But it won't. And the reason, as Goheen hints, is financial.
If Goheen tried to change the system, alumni would most certainly cut back their gifts to the University. The "Alumni Inertial Guidance System," which Altman talks about, inhibits the administration's action. Goheen won't act because he is afraid the University will be ruined. And he is probably right.
The alumni tyranny at Princeton is insurmountable. Besides its control over the administration, the alumni directly run all the clubs. Any decision a club makes must be ratified by its graduate board, the old men who keep the club solvent. The chairman of each club grad board is a member of the Grad ICC, and that organization can singlehandedly do whatever it wants to the clubs without University or undergraduate interference.
James W. Newman, who graduated in 1926, is chairman of Tower Club and of the Grad ICC. Although he has led the way in promoting more intellectual activities in clubs by providing speakers and libraries, Newman is typical of the reactionary element of the grad boards. Steve Oxman, president of the Undergraduate Council (UGC) and the prime mover in the Bicker revolt, said that Newman told him that even if 100 per cent of the undergraduates favored the new proposals, the grad ICC wouldn't budge. Only three grad board chairmen said that they would approve of changing Bicker, and then only if the Grad ICC and the UGC were nearly unanimous in their backing.
The rationale of some of these club chairmen is interesting. "It is tough to fail to get into a club you really want," said Colonial's Oliver A. Victor. "But there are many people who really wanted to get into Princeton and didn't make it. I really do not see a great difference in the two problems, and I believe this is part of the current competitive process in Twentieth Century America."
Another chairman said: "You can't sleep with every girl you'd like to. Why do you think you should get into every club you want to."
"Forcing a club to take a boy, or a boy to enter a particular club, only adds to the problems of getting along," commented Ivy chairman C. Pardee Foulke.
Oxman calls the Grad ICC "obdurate," and that seems a mild epithet. He sees no chance for the enactment of his proposal to liberalize Bicker unless there is a radical change in the nature of Princeton's alumni. And there does seem to be a change coming somewhere on the horizon.
The clubs are getting into financial trouble, John Alexander, chairman of the Prince told me. Colonial club president. Bruce Hazard thinks that this sudden money problem could have come because the alumni is finding more important things to donate their money to. Twentieth century egalitarianism could be catching. If it is, the clubs, which have very large budgets, could soon fold when the alumni decide to give them less money. Colonial, for example, employs ten full-time servants, and things get very expensive.
Oxman says that his only hope is that the University will offer to buy the clubs and the grad boards, in financial trouble, will jump at the deal. Then, with financial control, the University could run the clubs as it pleased. Hopefully, says Oxman, more equitably.
The timidity of the administration and the intransigence of the alumni were things that Oxman and the revolutionaries didn't figure on. Oxman thought he would get most of his trouble from the students, but if he could convince them, he would have it made. The students and the clubs posed a problem that the reformers could not solve. But even if
"You can't sleep with every girl you'd like to. Why do you think you should get into every club you want to?" one club's grad board chairman said. TELL THEM BY THEIR FACES Princeton undergraduate sociologists are constantly making studies of the oddities of Bicker and the club system. The chart below lists the clubs and the Woodrow Wilson Society and compares Darryl Kancko's face ranking of the clubs to Nelson Rose's consensus ranking. The face ranking was prepared using the Freshman Herald for the Class of 1967. A sample of students rated the 718 men on the Princeton grading scale, from 1 (top) to 7 (bottom), from what they thought of them just looking at their faces. Rose's ranking was gathered from questionnaires of more than 100 clubmen. Face rank information was not available for Dial Lodge.