The new 100 percent system has not come without adjustments and complaints. In particular, the more exclusive clubs object to having to take in less desirable messmates while those fur the down the social hierarchy resent getting the leftovers. But these adjustments are small in comparison to the value of giving every upperclassman a regular place to eat. Fifty years late, the new system has proved Wilson's charges partially wrong.
It was the Daily Princetonian which restated another Wilson objection to the system. In a series of editorials on titled "The Princeton Man and His Education," the paper wrote that "To a European, the most noticeable fact about the Princeton clubs is their tendency almost completely to isolate social from intellectual pursuits which form the raison d'etre of the University." The paper explained that when an upperclassman stepped out of Firestone Library or his dormitory, and crossed Washington Road to Prospect Street, he left behind him his books and his intellectual education.
Campus Center?
Yale and Harvard have avoided this split through their House and College plans, where students and faculty live, eat, and sometimes study together.
But by its very physical set-up the colleges makes this ideal difficult except in the perceptional meeting or the new Campus center. For upperclassmen eat by themselves in their clubs and live in dormitories without faculty. And the lowerclassmen eat by themselves and also live in dormitories without faculty.
No one has a clear solution to the divisions.
With all this talk and investigation, there are still some who say Princeton was good enought thirty years ago and it's good enough now.
But they are few and dying fast.
More than over the Administration is concerned with college adjustments within the large educational community of Princeton, N. J. The college and the graduate school share the same faculty but unlike the Harvard situation the two bodies have little influence on each other. The college within its rectangular block and the graduate school remains across Alexander Street.
Some thrive and others want to get out on the open road. The majority of students complain that the no car restriction isolates them from New York and Philadelphia. They feel the requirement of compulsory Chapel or Church every other week is tampering with their religious freedom. And many think the University is childish to force women out of their rooms at 7 p.m.
But most recognize that Princeton is a small community which never has and probably never will permit the social freedom of Cambridge and New Haven. The College wants to adjust its social scale to fit the times and the undergraduates as fairly as possible. It also wants to adhere to traditional Princeton social customs. How successfully it will do this through the Campus Center and the President's committee remains to be seen.
For President Wilson, at least, any final adjustment will be second best to one he proposed half a century ago. Wore he alive today, the great Princeton educator undoubtedly would have said. "I told you so."