A Song in the Night (12 page)

“I have something to say,” I said to the group.

They looked at me, tired, curious, uncertain.

“I was proud to be admitted to this club,” I began. “I have enjoyed my time here. I like you all very much. Some of you
have been especially good friends to me.” I scanned their faces and choked up slightly. Perhaps I was making a terrible mistake?

“At the same time I think we are part of a system that is unfair and unjust. I don’t agree with excluding women. And I don’t believe we have the right to sit in judgment like this over our friends and classmates from the same college. Our friendship within the club should not be purchased at the price of their rejection.”

They were silent, and I could sense an undercurrent of anger.

“I feel no alternative but to resign. Which I am doing immediately. Thank you. And goodbye.”

I walked out of the room, through the carpeted halls, down the carved staircase, and out the front door. My little electric cart was parked in front, in the snow. I turned it on and headed down the dark street toward my room. I was breathing hard, struggling with my emotions. As I drove away, I looked up at the sky and saw the moon hanging implacably in the ice-cold air. For a moment I was distracted by its brilliance, and by the cool magnanimity—or indifference—of its presence in the sky.

When I looked down again, I realized that I had done something irrevocable.

I was now out.

The weeks that followed offered a healthy lesson in the emotions stirred up by change. My regular circle of friends—those
who had never joined clubs—patted me on the back and teased me because it had taken me too long. My girlfriend smiled at me. I swiftly received several phone calls from club members saying that they supported my actions and admired me.
Great
, I said,
then let’s discuss how the club could be reformed. Maybe the club could start by admitting women. Did you want to meet and talk about this? Absolutely
, they said in cautious tones.
Let’s do that. In a few weeks
.

Others let it be known that my actions confirmed their long-time suspicions that I was a self-righteous jerk. A few did indeed dredge up the medical argument: I was said to have “collapsed” in the meeting. Perhaps the most surprising complaint—which over the years that followed I often heard in response to actions that pushed for change—was that I was right in
principle
, but I had blown the
timing
. Wasn’t I aware that there were confidential discussions about changing the club’s rules? It had been going so well, until I acted foolishly. Now, sadly, the opportunity for change had passed. My actions had backfired and I had no one to blame but myself.

I did have one meeting with about a dozen friends, who represented nearly a third of the club’s junior class members. I was excited. This was nearly a majority, and the people in the room would be in positions of power the next year. We mapped out some possible steps. Tentative agreements were reached. I emerged hopeful about the future.

This effort quickly ran out of gas. Though I was disappointed, I understood what had happened. My friends, many of whom I still respected, decided that this was some weird preoccupation of mine. The system really wasn’t that bad.
There was no need to speak; I was no longer a thorn in their side; out of sight, out of mind; silence is acquiescence.

I went through the spring and summer pondering what to do. I analyzed the calendar strategically. Bicker survived each year because the actual choosing came up suddenly in the dead of winter. The choices and consequences were so swift that there was little time to react. Within a few months the seniors graduated and the juniors took control, and the whole dance continued.

This time, however, we would start organizing early, in September. With a group of friends I created the “Social Alternatives Coalition.” Our goal was to push the clubs to open up and the university to create a college system, including a student center, which, incredibly, we did not have. Dozens of people came to our weekly meetings, and we followed a very loose form of democratic decision-making in which anyone who was in the room could vote. This meant that one week one group of students would decide one thing, and the next week a different cast of characters would decide something else. I chaired the meetings, torn between my delight at the growing engagement and frustrated by the uneven and unpredictable process. Eventually we lurched into a major decision: we were going to hold a demonstration on Prospect Street during Bicker Week.

Suddenly I was the head of an organizing campaign. To get our message out without money for flyers (the Internet, of course, did not yet exist), we simply decided to call every student in the school. We tore the school phone directory into
columns and handed them out to dozens of volunteers. This worked well: rooms with more than one occupant got more than one call. Every club member was informed of what was going to happen. We arranged for candles and bullhorns and all the other paraphernalia of public marches. We notified the administration and the local police.

When the day came, I went over to Prospect Street an hour early with two or three fellow organizers. It was winter again, and the sky was cold and gray. For a long time we waited, and no one showed up. Well, that’s okay, I thought. I will walk up and back with this small band and then I can retreat into my humiliation. At least it will be over.

And then people arrived, dozens and dozens and dozens. Eventually more than four hundred people gathered in front of the Woodrow Wilson School. We began our march, shuffling quietly along the sidewalk with our candles. There were a few signs, and occasionally people broke into chants, but mostly the march was solemn. When I passed Ivy Club, I glanced over and thought I saw a few faces looking through the curtains. I sighed with sorrow, wondering if I could have done something else to persuade my friends.

The next day the student paper announced that we had held the largest demonstration since the Vietnam War. The president of the university immediately appointed two committees. The first, the Committee on Undergraduate Residential Life, or CURL, was made up of students, faculty, and administrators. The second was made up of trustees who were designated to receive and debate the CURL report when it came through.
One assistant dean came up to me in the months that followed and said that the administrators had been looking for some ways to make changes, but they could not initiate them for fear of the reaction of the alumni and trustees who were still angry about admitting women. Our march had provided the impetus to act.

And oddly enough, it all worked. A participant in the march, Sally Frank, filed a lawsuit against one of the male clubs for banning her from admission. The clubs argued that they were private establishments, independent of the university. Sally, who advanced the case during her remaining years in college, in law school, and then as a law professor, argued that the university and the clubs were inextricably bound. There were no members who were not students. The university relied on the clubs to provide services it could not offer. Thus the clubs should be held accountable under the same rules barring discrimination among public accommodations. The case cranked on for fourteen years, until it reached the New Jersey Supreme Court. The court agreed with Frank and ordered the all-male clubs to admit women.

The CURL process also took decades and continued through three university presidents. Eventually the committee issued a report calling for Princeton to institute a college system. The trustees accepted it, and the university raised hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for these new internal entities.

Today Princeton has six residential colleges. Some of the clubs remain selective, but all admit women. It took nearly
thirty years, but through the hard work of hundreds of people, it is a less discriminatory campus.

“Do you think thirty years is a long time or a short time for major institutional change?” I asked a classmate over dinner about a year ago.

He paused and thought for a moment. “Of course in some ways it should have happened much faster,” he said. “But then again, there is always the chance that it might never have happened at all.”

W
hile we were still in France, we visited the great cathedrals and monasteries—Notre Dame, Beauvais, Sainte-Chapelle, Mont Saint Michel—and each time I found myself deeply moved. The soaring stone, the stunning stained glass windows, and the cool, peaceful interiors flickering with thousands of candles quelled me into silence whenever I stepped inside. On the site of the magnificent cathedral of Chartres, fifty miles outside Paris, five churches had risen in sequence before the final building began to take shape nearly a thousand years ago. The idea that more than fifty generations of men and women had devoted themselves to the building, protection, and improvement of this place of worship astonished me.

I had grown up as a nominal Christian; our family attended
church at Christmas and Easter and a few other times a year. I had enjoyed my engagement with a church youth group in Paris, but I did not feel I understood the world’s religions, or my own supposed faith. I wanted to remedy this, so over the years I occasionally dipped into the Bible, particularly the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, trying to read these unusual stories for myself.

I discovered, to my surprise, that most of my early impressions about Jesus of Nazareth had been false. Throughout my childhood Jesus had appeared to me as a benevolent authority figure, friendly in an abstract way, a distant leader venerated in stone and stained glass and in the tedious words of centuries-old prayers. As a teenager I thought that the whole enterprise of church reeked of hypocrisy, which in my calculus was perhaps the greatest of all sins. Through my youthful eyes the world was a mess, and much of the responsibility lay with the unwillingness of religious people to live up to the beautiful and challenging words of their own faiths.

To my surprise, I learned when I opened up the New Testament that Jesus had agreed with this critique. Instead of appearing as a kind of super-parent, handing out exhortations to people who were bad to be good, Jesus reserved his most acute, and in some cases blistering, criticism for those who took on the trappings and practice of religion but then used their piety as an excuse to judge and condemn others. He explicitly confronted those who were preoccupied with superficial forms of public behavior while they neglected the deeper demand for justice, for love, for humility, and for reconciliation.

In the texts Jesus comes across as a lively, dynamic, restlessly
compassionate man. He chooses not to distribute approval to the pious, and he offers encouragement to people struggling with faith. “Go and learn what this means,” he says at one point. “ ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ” He attacks the professionally religious for obeying small rules of behavior and missing the core purpose of a life of faith. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” he says in the Gospel of Matthew, “for … you have neglected the more important matters of the law, like justice and mercy and faithfulness.”

This unexpected splash of cold water woke me up. During one summer while I was still in high school, I suffered a bleeding that left me immobilized for a week. Looking for something to read, I picked up the Bible and worked my way through the gospels. Again I was struck by Jesus’ energy, his restlessness, his bubbling passion. And having learned that about him, I was less surprised to read that he regularly felt great frustration when his message did not seem to penetrate the minds of those who loved him and followed him closely. To many he said sadly, “You have eyes but you do not see, you have ears but you do not hear.” And in one of the most poignant passages of all, he evoked the image of children using music to try to elicit some kind of response, happy or sad, and failing, implicitly likening this to his own inability to generate a response: