Notebook - March 10, 1999
No more Nude Olympics?
Trustees endorse ban on the winter revels,
discuss alcohol initiative
What has been for almost 30 years a rite of passage for Princeton students will almost surely come to an end. At their January 23 meeting, the trustees expressed "unanimous support" for President Shapiro's earlier statement calling for a permanent ban on the Nude Olympics, said W. Taylor Reveley III '65, the chairman of the Trustee Committee on Student Life, Health, and Athletics.
The trustees also reviewed some 80 proposals from university departments, offices, committees, and groups under an initiative announced last spring for addressing alcohol abuse on campus.
"Everybody has to be involved" in solving the problem of alcohol abuse, said Reveley, who believes that the key to making this initiative work is cultural change: undergraduates have to buy into the reality that drinking is a problem. Nothing is going to get done, he added, "unless the students want it to change."
Shapiro and the trustees have been concerned for years about the Nude Olympics, which, in Reveley's view, has been "spiraling out of control." When 350 students ran naked on January 8, 10 students became dangerously intoxicated at the event, dubbed by its critics as the "Lewd Olympics" and "Crude Olympics" (Notebook, February 10).
In their official statement, the trustees said they find "intolerable the serious risks that the Nude Olympics have come to pose to our students' health, safety, and well-being, in large measure because of the excessive and indiscriminate use of alcohol....We concur with President Shapiro's judgment that it would be irresponsible to permit any event of this nature to continue."
At Shapiro's directive, Dean of Student Life Janina
Montero (pictured) is chairing a committee to develop a plan for ending
the Nude Olympics with as much student support as possible. The event "can't
be made safe -- it's too unruly," said Montero. The committee, comprising
faculty members, administrators, and students, will also determine the consequences
for any students who ignore the ban on running naked. Shapiro and the trustees
will then review the recommendations.
Student opinion on the probable demise of the Nude Olympics is mixed, said Spencer Merriweather '00, president of the Undergraduate Student Government, which wants to discuss a wider range of options than simply ending the event.
In The Daily Princetonian, students have weighed in both for and against an end to the tradition. "I feel ashamed of belonging to this institution," wrote Sameen Gauhar '99 on the op-ed page. "I will be shocked if my peers defend this tradition knowing it has risked the lives and virtues of some of their classmates." But in the view of Patrick Malone '01, terminating the Olympics would simply punish the majority for the errors of a few. The editors of the paper have called for "one more chance to prove this year was merely an aberration."
ALCOHOL INITIATIVE
This month the Trustee Committee on Student Life, Health, and Athletics will meet with student groups to continue soliciting their ideas for curbing alcohol abuse. At the trustees' meeting in April, the committee expects to pull together an action plan describing what various groups on campus will do, said Reveley.
Proposals being considered by the trustees include encouraging closer monitoring of drinking at eating clubs by their graduate boards; urging student organizations to sponsor more alcohol-free events; getting team captains to play more active roles in helping athletes who abuse alcohol; and further restricting access to alcohol at Reunions.
One proposal already being implemented is a pilot program designating specific dormitory rooms off limits to smoking or drinking. Next year, 10 singles in Edwards Hall will be substance-free, said Montero, and 21 rooms in Henry Hall will be smoke-free.
Dean of the Faculty Joseph H. Taylor and other faculty members are exploring whether scheduling more Friday classes would limit student drinking on Thursday nights.
For Princeton to see real change in alcohol use, said Merriweather, undergraduates themselves "need to take the initiative." The USG, he said, will organize a forum to air student ideas and will put in writing those suggestions and others gathered from across campus.
Noting that more than 50 students nationwide die every year from alcohol abuse, Montero said that all of higher education faces this "intractable issue."
More extensive coverage of alcohol abuse at Princeton will appear in the March 24 paw.
-- Kathryn Federici Greenwood
Color and opportunity
Marta Tienda examines the links between race,
poverty, fertility, and employment.
Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Marta
Tienda finds plenty of food for thought in the relationships between minority
status, education, fertility, poverty, and unemployment. Like many others,
she has found limitations in the data used to sort out these links. But
in her forthcoming book, Color and Opportunity: Welfare, Work and the
Urban Underclass, Tienda tries to break through those limitations to
show that when the effects of one's background and place of residence are
stripped away, race matters.
Color, or minority-group status, Tienda says, "limits economic opportunity -- that is, chances to work and earn a living wage -- more than can be attributed to declining employment options." Tienda, who became the director of the Office of Population Research last July, came to Princeton in 1997 from the University of Chicago. There she studied data from the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago.
An important thread through Tienda's work is the distinction between poor people, who may or may not live among others who are poor, and poor places, which are areas with high levels of poverty. This comparison revealed how Chicago's poor blacks fare worse than poor whites, poor Puerto Ricans, or poor Mexicans. Her analysis showed that Chicago's poor blacks are very highly segregated, both from other racial groups and from jobs. "Hispanic and other ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods do not exhibit the extraordinary levels of joblessness and economic deprivation that characterize Chicago's black neighborhoods," says Tienda.
Many of her findings deflate stereotypes about the poor and their use of welfare. She challenges the argument that a disproportionate share of welfare goes to urban ghettos. In fact, Tienda found that those who live in urban ghettos are no more likely to use welfare or to be unemployed than the general urban poor with similar characteristics. Contrary to stereotypes, she found that among the jobless, black fathers were more willing to work -- and to settle for a lower wage -- than white fathers.
WELFARE AND CHILDBEARING
Tienda also found that the use of welfare was linked to a person's family background -- whether that person had grown up in poverty or had had a child before marriage, for instance. At the national level, racial and ethnic differences in welfare participation disappeared when these factors were taken into account. But that was not true in Chicago, the most highly segregated city in the country. Tienda found that black and Puerto Rican women in poor neighborhoods were more likely than white and Mexican women to use welfare.
One might assume that a "welfare culture" has developed in certain Chicago neighborhoods, Tienda says. "But an alternate hypothesis is that the observed inequities may also reflect ever more limited job opportunities. Specifically, black and Puerto Rican residents may face more formidable labor-market barriers than Mexican immigrants, who allegedly have been crowding out native minority workers from the low-wage market."
Having a child before marriage proved to be the most important link to welfare use, Tienda found in research with Haya Stier of Tel Aviv University and Renata Forste of Brigham Young. Early childbearing has been on the rise among all racial groups, but especially among black inner-city residents. "Because minority mothers are more likely than white mothers to have been reared in poverty, it is difficult to disentangle the influence on family formation patterns of poverty and minority status," Stier and Tienda wrote in 1997.
Again, the difference between poor people and poor places was crucial. Stier and Tienda isolated the effects of race and place of residence by comparing highly segregated Chicago to national urban samples. Results showed that both race and place of residence played roles. Among low-income white and Hispanic urban mothers, about a third had a child before marrying; among low-income blacks, the rate was nearly 80 percent.
Thus, for nonblack mothers, poverty was the factor that influenced the likelihood of having a child before marriage. Among Chicago blacks, the concentration of poverty was a factor, but clearly not the only one. "Chicago black mothers exhibit a faster rate of entry to family life via birth than black mothers nationally, but also compared to nonblack mothers residing in poor Chicago neighborhoods," says Tienda.
The connections between race, poverty, fertility, and employment are just one area that interests Tienda. She is also the author of The Hispanic Population of the United States (with Frank Bean, 1987) and coeditor of Divided Opportunities (1988) and The Drug Connection in U.S.-Mexican Relations (1989).
-- Mary Caffrey
A longer version of this article appeared in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin.
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