Word: bickering
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...object of Bicker, according to a booklet published by the clubs themselves ("Now That You Are Eligible"), is to discover "personableness in the individual" and "congeniality of the total section." It is a method for assuring each club that any student to whom it offers a bid is of the "club type...
Immediately after finals--this year on Thursday, January 30, the Bicker committees of the clubs start to make their calls. These calls continue for ten days. Classes resume not long after Bicker has started, but they are largely ignored, sophomores finding it "hard to read anything more advanced than Peyton Place...
...basis of a few minutes of stereotyped small talk the committees rate the eligibles, and the clubs immediately begin cutting their lists, most "from the top" as well as "from the bottom." Each night fewer clubs come calling at a given room. If, on the last night of the Bicker period, a sophomore is still receiving a committee, he has probably procured a "first-list bid." If not, and he has good friends whom a certain club is anxious to have, he may receive a "second-list bid" that will get him in if they accept their first-list bids...
Individual sophomores are associated together in complexes of friends known as "preferentials," all of whose members desire to remain together with varying degrees of zeal. The exigencies of Bicker force most of these preferentials into greater or less states of disintegration, a process which widely subjects old friendships to severe strains and sometimes even shatters them. A sophomore's preferential group may also be used by the clubs to appraise and manipulate him throughout the Bicker procedure...
...commonly called, "the facility." Wilson Lodge was founded last year by the University and supposedly provides "an alternative to the club system" for those who want neither to renounce all social activity for three years of college life nor to pass through the indignity of Bicker and accept membership in one of the seventeen eating clubs. But any one in the university, with the possible exception of the administration, will freely admit that the three-room facility in no sense provides a satisfactory alternative...