Word: bickering
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...some people want to change all this. Mostly they are dissatisfied with Bicker, the ritual by which the clubs choose their members from the sophomore class each year after January finals...
This year the revolt against Bicker failed. The great monolith was too entrenched. A group of ten of the biggest men on campus got together and tried to budge it. They included the president of the Undergraduate Council, the chairman of the Daily Princetonian, the president of the Orange Key Society, five other club members and the secretary-treasurer of the class of 1969. It didn't take them long to find out that the club system with its 90 years of tradition was not about to be moved...
Nobody thought of activism or picketing or confrontation. What the ten-man committee wanted was rational discussion of issues in a calm, gentlemanly way. In November they issued a 16-page pamphlet entitled "Report on Bicker and Proposals for Change." It outlined their ideas for changing Bicker and told why they wanted it changed. It influenced a lot of people. The committee took a poll and found that a little less than 40 per cent of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes agreed with their proposal...
...Bicker is a frightening and trivial experience. Almost everyone who goes through it says that. For six nights each sophomore is interviewed by representatives from all the clubs, who visit him in his room. If he's good, the sophomore will get eight or nine bids to join different clubs. If he's not so good (according to the clubs' scale of "coolness," as the system's opponents call the criterion), then he will get just one or two bids, or maybe none...
Inevitably, someone cries, someone gets irreparably hurt. On Open House night, everyone but the 30 or 40 who don't have bids yet boozes it up happily. It can be a very bad scene. Locked away in a room in one of the clubs, the members of the sophomore Bicker committee (top sophomore class members) and the Bicker, chairman from all the clubs get together to try to put everyone still bidless in some club. One Colonial man, who was a member of the sophomore committee last year called it "a very terrible thing. People were just casually trading...