Cloister Inn

The Gothic towers and archways of Princeton’s newest dormitories were pieced together from 6,000 tons of hand-carved limestone and five types of custom-blended bluestone. Full-grown redwoods, cedars and firs were hoisted into place with cranes. Mahogany-framed leaded windows open the old-fashioned way, by hand-turned cranks, and the three-inch-thick oak doors were finished with teak oil.

At a cost of some $100 million, the residential complex known collectively as Whitman College looks as if it has always been there, on a campus whose traditions run centuries deep. The luxury continues inside: duplex suites, semi-private dining rooms, classrooms, a library with computer carrels, a digital photo lab, a performing arts theatre with dressing rooms, a lounge with a piano and big-screen television. But the university is not just building a new residential college; it is reinventing campus life.

Whitman will anchor a new four-year residential college system, including two reconfigured two-year colleges, Mathey and Butler, intended to give juniors and seniors an alternative to the private eating clubs that have been the dominant social force here for more than a century.

Since 1982, every incoming freshman has been randomly assigned to live in one of the five colleges — Mathey, Butler, Rockefeller, Forbes and Wilson — where they are encouraged to dine, socialise and form a community under the guidance of faculty members. But come third year, they have to move, and many end up at the “junior slums,” as some upperclass dorms are known. In the absence of dining halls, more than 70 percent of juniors and seniors join an eating club. The rest eat in underclass colleges and at student centres under a university meal plan or they become responsible for their sustenance.

Ivy Club

The clubs have evolved into much more than a place to take meals. Half of the 10 clubs, which shun publicity about their rituals and operations, still handpick new members through “bicker”, a multinight process said to be named for the bickering over which applicants to accept. Critics have said that the clubs reinforce socio-economic divisions at a university whose population ranges from scions of the nation’s wealthiest families to students on full need-based scholarships. They have also become known for underage drinking and noisy parties.

Rob Biederman, the student government president, expects the four-year colleges to provide a continuous social experience that doesn’t exist now, and an opportunity for students who forego clubs. Biederman will move into Whitman for his senior year after unsuccessfully bickering at two selective clubs. He describes his junior year as a “hunter-gatherer lifestyle”, alternating meals at the student centre and local restaurants. “I think if you asked people at the end of Princeton to rate how happy they were, people in eating clubs would be the happiest,” he says. “And people in four-year colleges will be just as happy as the people in eating clubs.”

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, college dean, says the new colleges were created not to compete with the eating clubs but as a response to students who wanted to remain in their colleges and were asking for a broader menu of social programmes. “We’re enabling students to choose what they want to do,” she says.

Still, the potential impact on the clubs has not gone unnoticed.

Kyle Morgan, a Tiger Inn president who graduated in June, says he is concerned that students who might have joined clubs will be tempted away by perks the university is dangling: “If it’s, ‘Hey, you can live in a 1,300 sq ft, five-room quad and have a photo lab right next door or you can live in Brown Hall and join an eating club,’ I don’t think you’re presenting students with equal options.”

Tiger Inn

Princeton’s eating clubs occupy stately mansions off campus. They hire their own chefs and staff to run the buildings, which include a dining room, living room, library and a taproom. Members tend to stop by several times a day for meals, study breaks, movie nights and formal dances.

The first official eating club, Ivy, was formed in 1879 by a group of students who rented a stove and hired a cook, according to William K. Selden’s historical account, Club Life at Princeton. Mediocre food and sporadic operation of the campus dining hall had driven students to seek out local boardinghouses, and more than 20 clubs eventually formed, though failing finances and declining membership closed half. Women were admitted to the last all-male holdouts, after a decade of discrimination litigation, in 1991.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton alumnus, offered a primer on the distinct character and social standing of the clubs in his 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise. He pegged the exclusive Ivy Club as “detached and breathlessly aristocratic” and Tiger Inn as “broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalised by an honest elaboration of prep-school standards” — both descriptions that could apply today.

While not every eating club is easily defined, many have established identities that attract like-minded members. The Cap and Gown Club is said to attract athletes, though swimmers and rowers (“floaters and boaters”) favour Cloister Inn.

“You talk to people who are 60 or 70 years old, and the thing they remember most about being at Princeton is being in the eating clubs,” says Marco Fossati-Bellani, a president of Colonial Club who graduated in June. “It’s one of the things I’m going to take away from Princeton. Everything I did that was fun came through Colonial.”

Eating-club fun of recent years has gotten out of hand.

Tiger Inn (TI) — often called Princeton’s “Animal House” — went dry for nearly two months in 2006 after reports of alcohol abuse and a sexual assault during “pickups” weekend, when, in the culmination to bicker, new members celebrate their initiation. That was the second report that school year of a sexual assault at the club. “It had gotten to the point where people on Prospect were saying, ‘It’s TI, what do you expect?’ ” says Hap Cooper, the club’s graduate board president. “That embarrassed them.”

Tiger Inn reopened its taps with new security and alcohol policies, including a buddy system to check on new members and in-house escorts to guide intoxicated students home. In addition, students who misbehave can have privileges restricted.

Some students say the changes have encouraged them to act more responsibly. “Definitely, people have grown up,” says Morgan of Tiger Inn.

While several members describe bicker as a “G-rated” fraternity rush, with get-to-know-you activities like Taboo and Pictionary, costume wearing, relay races and the telling of funny stories about yourself, others describe a selection process that assesses candidates for wealth, family connections and physical attractiveness.

Woodrow Wilson, who as the university’s president had proposed eliminating eating clubs, declared that the lot of those students who were left out was “a little less than deplorable”. The current president, Shirley M. Tilghman, has criticised the selective clubs for choosing too “homogeneously” and not representing “the spirit of Princeton”. Students have organised boycotts of the system at various times.

If administrators have had differences with the clubs, which are independent of the university, they have come to accept their importance.

Mark Burstein, Princeton’s executive vice-president, says he met regularly with club officers and alumni to solicit input and secure their co-operation for the four-year residential colleges. “We see a strong connection to the eating clubs,” he says. “You can’t really separate out entities that are so essential to your student population. I would say that we are part of the same family.”

In the past, the university has covered the cost of a typical meal plan — $4,315 last year, as opposed to the average club fee of $6,300 — for juniors and seniors receiving financial aid. This fall, the university will increase that aid by $2,000. All juniors and seniors can also eat two free meals a week at any residential college. The eating clubs, in turn, have agreed to let about 100 residents of the colleges join a club at a reduced rate. The majority of students, though, will have to choose between the two.

If last spring’s room draw is any indication, there is no shortage of interest in the four-year colleges. Whitman filled quickly — 476 applied for the 204 upperclass spots, with the remaining rooms reserved for about 300 freshmen and sophomores.

Meg Whitman, an alumnus and chief executive officer of eBay, donated $30 million for the construction of Whitman College. The eating clubs may find competition in the food stations, which will offer salad, pizza and grilled foods in place of the assembly-line cafeteria service of yore. The dining hall will have booths and smaller tables instead of large ones arranged in rows. An area will be kept open for late-night snacks.

The colleges also have their own activities budgets and academic faculty advisers, who will be assigned to residents for all four years. The university’s writing programme has been relocated to Whitman, where instructors will have offices and meet with students in seminar rooms on the ground floor.

Jennifer Schoppe, who just completed her freshman year in Mathey, says when she arrived she assumed she would join an eating club. But Schoppe, an engineering major, says she is loathe to give up the perks of the residential college, including informal lunches with professors and subsidised tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

“Once you leave the college, it’s not available to you anymore,” she says. “It’s definitely made me think of the options a lot harder.”