Word: bicker
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Most people agree that Bicker is at best an imperfect system, but few refuse to participate in it. Those who chose this course found a refuge in the Woodrow Wilson Lodge, the so-called "alternate facility" set up by the University in 1956. Until this year, the "facility" was considered a dumping ground, and only a handful was willing to join. It did not matter that the handful was an intelligent and congenial group; its numbers were too small to be significant...
...this year, before Bicker ever got under way, what Dean of Students William D'O. Lippincott has termed "a surprisingly large number" rejected the club system and Bicker to join the the Lodge. The treasurer of the sophomore class, Darwin S. Labarthe, was among the first to take the step; his presence, and that of other men whose success at Bicker was more or less assured, made the Lodge much more than a dumping ground for club rejects (for people with "green skin and three heads," as Labarthe put it). This spontaneous action of about forty sophomores had made...
...distinction is certainly marked during Bicker, and it probably holds a good deal of truth the rest of the year. The charge of "anti-intellectualism on the Street" is one that finds increasing currency at Princeton. Professor James Ward Smith of the Philosophy Department, in an article for The Daily Princetonian, stated the case for those who reject not the club system but what the club system now does...
...time it has grown--with its sudden spurt this winter--to equal most of the clubs, and promises to become still larger. There are more than fifty sophomores in the Lodge now--a number greater than sophomore "sections" of all but one club; most of these fifty joined before Bicker started, not, according to Dean Lippincott, out of fear of Bicker, but purely by choice and from a feeling that the alternative of the Lodge is what they wanted...
...establishment of Wilson Lodge in 1956 was a response to the increasingly disturbing tension inherent in the Bicker system. Bicker was, and is, torn between two mutually exclusive first principles--selectivity ("A guy's got the right to choose the fellows he wants to eat with") and 100% ("Every sophomore participating in Bicker must get a bid to a club"). The creation of a "meaningful alternative" to club membership, in the words of President Goheen, makes the move to Prospect Street a matter of "voluntary choice, not herd compulsion...