<p>I think Mommalis has it right.</p>
<p>Hunt, I think you may have been seeing what you expected to see on your visit.</p>
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<p>Tower Club started this four or five years ago and some version of it has now spread to the remaining bicker clubs. Even Tiger Inn, often thought of as the rowdiest of the clubs, has such a policy. They don’t all have the same name for it.</p>
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<p>I just don’t see the resemblance. Fraternities and sororities are, of course, single gender, unlike the eating clubs which are all co-ed. While 50% of the eating clubs allow membership to anyone who wants to “sign-in”, no fraternities or sororities operate in this way. Fraternities and sororities typically provide housing for their members. The only Princeton students who live at the eating clubs are the very few who are officers. Finally, the membership in each eating club numbers around 200. Most fraternities and sororities are tightly-knit groups of no more than a couple of dozen students each.</p>
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<p>Oh, I think you’ll find the vast majority of Princeton students and alumni agreeing about the general nature of the clubs whether they belonged to a bicker club, a sign-in club, or, like me and many other alumni who post here on CC, did not belong to any of them.</p>
<p>The clubs offer a great deal of entertainment and camaraderie for juniors, seniors and even many sophomores. The parties vary in quality but are often terrific and generally open (even at the bicker clubs) to non-members. Most importantly, the eating clubs are, unsurprisingly, mostly about eating. Sharing meals with classmates in the more intimate settings of the clubs is great though many juniors and seniors are now opting to remain in the four year residential colleges or go independent, as I did.</p>
<p>Hunt, I believe that you are either a Yale alum or a Yale parent. Isn’t that correct? If so, you may have a different view of this but it seems to me that Yale’s Secret Societies are far more like fraternities and sororities than are Princeton’s eating clubs. The Secret Societies at Yale have exploded in number and now attract a very large percentage of all seniors. </p>
<p>While the ‘landed’ societies (e.g. Skull and Bones with its ‘tomb’) are still relatively few in number (and, like fraternities, have very small memberships) there are now, according to recent reports, as many as 41 Secret Societies at Yale with nearly 600 members, almost half of all seniors belong to one. All of them are exclusive, membership is by invitation only and except for the fact that they do not have their own houses, they appear much more similar to fraternities and sororities than do Princeton’s eating clubs. You can Google “Rumpus, Yale, Secret Society, exclusive” to learn more and to see the documentation in some of the stories. </p>
<p>Apparently, Rumpus distributed across campus a printed list of the roughly 600 members and the names of the Secret Societies. </p>
<p>The Secret Socieites, of course, are in addition to the many fraternities and sororities (sixteen or so) that exist at Yale. (About the same number exist at Princeton and Harvard.) Some of these fraternities have their own houses and the behavior or their pledges has helped lead directly to the current Title IX investigation. </p>
<p>[Yale</a> under federal investigation for possible Title IX violations | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/01/yale-under-investigation/]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/01/yale-under-investigation/)</p>