Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dean Bender, one of the most sensible of the Clubs' critics, points out that entering a Club can easily isolate an undergraduate from the rest of University life. For the Club members, college becomes a highly limiting experience instead of the broadening one it might be. As far as social contacts go, the Clubs are simply little St. Paul's or Grotons or Miltons all over again. Bender calls them "little bastions" where all are of one social background, one economic status, even one geographic area...
...contact with people outside the Club world. But the lure into this breezy Clubbie limbo can easily be overcome, and there are more and more Club members today whose college interests and acquaintances are fairly well shuffled. It also can be argued that the Clubs, where interests differ but social background is the same, are no more confining than the dramatic or athletic cliques, where interests are the same and social background makes no difference...
...have on their members as individuals, their effect on the college as a whole is practically nil, and this is probably the system's strong point. At Princeton, where every undergraduate must join a club in order to eat, everyone must submit to Bicker's embarrassing process of social rating. The same is approximately true of any college where there is a widespread fraternity system. Some bitterness and bad feeling are bound to result when there is pressure on everyone to join and the club system is a matter of college-wide prestige. This is what Harvard has successfully avoided...
Ironically, it is the most repellent qualities of the Clubs that give the system this advantage. Their snobbishness, their secrecy, their uncreativity, their preoccupation with an isolated social world all tend to dissuade most undergraduates from any any wish to join. Dean Bender, in the same breath as he criticizes the Clubs for "narrowness," feverently hopes "that the Clubs never start getting democratic." If the Clubs were to elect people on a basis of creative merit, he points out, then undergraduates might really begin to care about joining. The Clubs would become a generally recognized elite, and the punching season...
...Council. More often he took what was given, Ward 17 or Boston society, and moved around in it a little faster than anyone else. Limiting himself to what he could get out of a thing, he made few forays into the more creative spheres of machine building or organized social planning. Like his social security (the ten dollar handouts), his civic improvements were piecemeal affairs where he made sure that the recipient knew about the donor, and where the donor was himself a recipient...