<p>“Scottie’s chronic efforts to compare the dominant role the ‘EAting Clubs’ play with respect to social life at Princeton with the impact of the miniscule anbd relatively low-profile ‘secret societies’ at Yale or ‘final clubs’ at Harvard are highly dishonest and utterly without merit, as he well knows.”</p>
<p>there’s no question that the eating clubs play a central role in princeton’s social life. i’ve never denied that. in fact, i’ve argued in several threads that the very pervasiveness of the clubs is a good thing, because it doesn’t segment a small group of “haves” from a larger one of “have nots.” i fully understand, moreover, that harvard’s final clubs and yale’s secret societies play smaller roles in the social scenes of each school, though i’d hardly characterize their impacts as “miniscule” [sic]. i think both institutions are “worse” than eating clubs, because they pick their members, rather than the members picking them. only students (male students at harvard) deemed “worthy” by their senior peers are “tapped” for inclusion in these societies. at yale, the rest of the students never set foot in a society’s tomb, and at harvard, the rest of the students face obstacles in doing so - it’s my understanding that women still cannot enter certain rooms at final clubs. this, i believe, creates a sharper division between haves and have nots than at princeton, where any student with a pen or pencil can sign into one of the five clubs that practices a non-selective admissions procedure. a student can also “bicker” a selective club, for which the overall odds are much greater than 50/50, and if they happen to fail, they can still party at that club the remainder of their time at the school. even if they don’t join any club (and a fraction of upperclassmen don’t), they can still participate fully in the club social scene. now, while i personally wish that the remaining bicker clubs would drop their selective procedures, i can certainly understand why they retain them. simply put, people like to pick their mates, whether its roommates, teammates, or clubmates. still, i think the system is fairly egalitarian, and certainly serves princeton well. 98% of freshmen return for their sophomore year, 97% graduate, and a national-best ~60% give money to the university in any given year.</p>