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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Coed or not, I don't get how you work your ass of in high school and go through a rigorous and selective admissions application process, to then have to "interview" for a decent place to eat, study and socialize.[/quote]

I agree and wonder what the point of these "eating clubs" (ridiculous name, BTW) is.  Why not just have a huge dining hall where everyone goes to eat, socialize, etc., and then parties in various dorms/apts.?  I went to a school with no Greek system, eating clubs, etc. and that's how we did it.  Everyone partied together, ate together, etc.  No problems and no elitism.[/quote]

[b]The name dates back to the 1800s and, ironically, the eating clubs emerged as an alternative to fraternities that had been prohibited.[/b]

Supposedly, when he was president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson wanted to replace the eating clubs with a system of residential colleges modeled after Oxbridge.  The trustees refused to go along with his suggestion (later adopted by Yale) and Wilson was so annoyed that he decided to enter politics instead.

The food in the eating clubs can be excellent and certainly better than standard university dining hall-fare.  The clubs also have more space for parties than dorms and apartments.

Even if Princeton got rid of eating clubs tomorrow, and required students to live and eat in residential colleges for four years, it would still be an elitist institution.  That comes with being the top-ranked undergraduate institution in the country.  The benefit would be that the university would clearly be responsible for what takes place in the colleges, as opposed to taking the flaky position that the clubs are independent of the university and outside their control.  [/quote]

No,  you have it backwards.  Read Stover at Yale.  The dining clubs go back and model the Oxbridge style of dining hall wherein male students ate in the dining hall within their own college.  They didn't go to a central dining service.  The very early college campuses in America  did not have dorms, so the young men selected "digs" and rented out flats together. Then came the food question.  So what they did was create "eating or dining clubs" and hire out the cooking.  These dining clubs were often in a different spot than the digs.  They eventually became known as "Skull & Bones", etc.  Owen Johnson describes in Stover that the selection for the clubs was not "bickering" it was they (club members) picked you.  It was a brutal system and a character named Brockhurst in STover comes to question all of this and our heroine , Stover, ultimately agrees that the dining clubs were wrong.  The dining clubs eventually became today's frats and sororities.  They still exist on most elite campuses.  When I was at Harvard the top dining club was the The Porcellian - all men.  I don't know if they ever let women in.[/quote]

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