Word: bicker
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...chief victim of Wolff's sharp prose is the bizarre Princeton tradition of "Bicker," a two-week period of psychological torture originally designed to determine which Princeton men had what it took to join the college's exclusive eating clubs. The tradition has become a not-so-illustrious chapter in the university's illustrious past--many clubs are no longer exclusive, and some students entirely reject the clubs. A recent court decision requiring the two remaining all-male clubs to admit women is the final blow to this bastion of the old boy network...
...Bicker in the late 1950s, as Wolff describes it, was a positively hellish experience. "The institution of Bicker is too perversely odd for my fancy to have fabricated," Wolff writes in the author's note. Sophomores register themselves in "Preferentials," groups of students who want to join the same club. The Preferentials go everywhere together--to meals, to tour the various clubs--but for the most part just wait for the upper-class club members to visit them and ask trite questions meant to discriminate between the gentlemen and the well-not-our-kinds...
Another strange twist on this ceremony of exculsivity is Princeton's grafting onto it the American love of equality. The university's egalitarian addition to the ancient ritual of selection and rejection is the condition that everyone who bickers must be offered a bid by at least one club. Princeton mandates that one hundred percent of Bicker's participants find a home, or at least a dinner table. And so, at the very end of Bicker, while the chosen few are welcomed through the distinguished doors of Ivy, or Cottage, or Cap and Gown, and while those less fortunate console...
Clay finds that the ruthlessness of Bicker is not meant to shape character, but to test it. Only those who possess the perfect graces of class and charm can successfully scale the ivied walls of discrimination...
Nathaniel Clay, Wolff's hero, attended Princeton in the late '50s -- as did Wolff -- and was snubbed by adolescent aristocrats there, who failed to invite him, in the excruciating selection process oddly called "Bicker," to join one of the university's exclusive and very social eating clubs. Clay's offense seemed to be not so much that he came from a prosperous, partly Jewish Seattle family, but that he was unrepentant about this shortcoming. He acted uppity, as if he had nothing to be ashamed of. Thus it was necessary that he be humbled, and the cruelty with which this...