Notebook - February 10, 1999
In the service of Bacchus
Lewdness of the 1999 Nude Olympics prompts calls to ban it
All universities have warts, but most don't expose them under bright floodlights in an icy, gothic courtyard. On Friday, January 8, Princeton held its 20-somethingth Nude Olympics, and the result was a record 10 dangerously intoxicated students, a series of embarrassing headlines, and reports of truly unconscionable behavior.
Princeton awoke that morning with snow already on the ground, and while the snow was supposed to turn to rain in the mid-afternoon, it instead just faded into a miserable sleet. Despite the icy conditions, the sophomore class officers decided to hold the Olympics, and many students started drinking early in the day to "get ready" for the games. A few students lost more than their inhibitions -- six undergraduates were hospitalized with alcohol poisoning, and the proctors took an additional four intoxicated students to McCosh Health Center. An EMT told Mathey Master David Carrasco that one of his female students, who reportedly vomited blood, would "probably live," but that he didn't know how much long-term damage she'd done to her body and brain.
The 350 participants and 750 spectators who made it to Holder courtyard formed two tight concentric circles that left no room for any type of Olympic games. What occurred instead was described by several witnesses as a "mosh pit," and the stories that have emerged from that tangle of naked bodies are horrifying enough to stretch credulity -- and make the Starr Report seem tame. Anna Levy-Warren '01 described the scene to the Newark Star-Ledger: "I was in the circle, and I felt a guy grabbing my rear end. I looked (around), and I saw someone getting peed on, a couple having sex, a guy masturbating. There was a guy in an executioner's mask just tackling girls." Carrasco, who in a letter to President Shapiro described the Olympics as "an inebriated mob, a riot in slow motion," says, "There were a lot of kids in trouble, and Princeton was not prepared to help them. They needed to be pulled out of that circle, and we couldn't get to them." Dean of Students Janina Montero adds, "There was aggressive behavior that [we] were powerless to control."
That aggressive behavior included sexual assault: certainly inappropriate and unwanted touching, and possibly rape. So far, no students have reported sexual assaults to the SHARE (Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources and Education) office. "That's not unusual in cases like this," SHARE Director Janet Waronker says. "These types of incidents often go unreported. But bad things did happen, and the students [I've talked to] didn't think a lot of [them] were consensual."
The full story of what occurred that night didn't begin to emerge until Shapiro wrote an open letter to students in The Daily Princetonian on Wednesday, January 13. Using unusually vehement words, Shapiro referred to "truly disgraceful and unacceptable" behavior and concluded that "while I recognize that versions of this event have been a regular occurrence in recent years, I believe we can no longer tolerate the risks that it has come to pose to our students. I am simply not willing to wait until a student dies before taking preventive action." In the aftermath of Shapiro's letter, the story made national headlines, and The New York Times ran an article about the Nude Olympics on the front page of its Metro section.
Many students who had been at the Olympics were surprised by some of the accounts in the newspaper stories -- meaning either that Princeton's tolerance for loutish behavior has been raised to astonishing heights or that those incidents were less ubiquitous than the press has made them seem. One sophomore, who asked not to be identified, said, "[My friends and I] were there for over an hour, and we didn't see anything weirder than a bunch of drunk, naked people jumping around." Many students and alumni -- especially those with fond memories of previous Olympics -- hope the tradition will continue in some form. Spencer Merriweather '00, the recently elected president of the Undergraduate Student Government, says, "What happened was horrifying, but if we can make the Nude Olympics safe, it's worth preserving. A lot of people had a great time."
RITES' BEGINNINGS
While the number of students participating in the Nude Olympics -- and the accompanying press coverage -- have grown dramatically over the last 15 years, the event itself is almost three decades old. Its origins are somewhat unclear, but many alumni remember that the games began in the early 1970s. The Daily Princetonian ran a front-page story on the 1974 Olympics, which featured 75 members from the class of '76 streaking across campus and into Dillon pool -- briefly interrupting the Eastern championship swim meet.
The Olympics continued, seldom attracting much publicity, until 1989, when women ran in large numbers for the first time and the Princeton Packet published a story on the tradition. Ever since, the event has attracted reporters from both the local media and wire services who seem fascinated by the idea of naked Princetonians.
Even during the first few coed Olympics, some women complained of harassment. In 1991, during a meeting of past and future female Olympians sponsored by the Women's Center and SHARE, a woman who had run recalled (as reported by the Prince), "One of the men running with us grabbed my breast for about 50 yards. I ran pretty sober, but I shouldn't have drunk anything." The group advised future female Olympians to stay sober and run together -- a message that this year's participants either forgot or never heard.
The carnage from the 1992 Olympics almost ended the event: three students hospitalized, a $1,500-dollar window broken in the J. B. Winberie restaurant, 31 students arrested for "lewdness and disorderly conduct." Dean of Students Eugene Y. Lowe, Jr. '71 said at the time, "I call on the student community to join in putting a stop to this event, which is clearly dangerous and clearly out of control." But the Olympics occurred again the next year -- and every year -- until 1997-98, when there was no snow.
The university has recently made several efforts to make the event safer, confining it to within a flood-lit Holder Court and barring entry to anyone without a valid university ID card. But ironically, containing an event that now routinely draws over a thousand people to the cramped courtyard may have contributed to this year's debacle. Nude Olympians in the past used to run, compete in wheelbarrow races and three-legged relays, and do jumping jacks; this year they huddled together in a tight circle compressed by spectators. Institutionalizing the event may also have increased the peer pressure on some students to run -- which would explain why more students run now than in the past.
What made these Olympics particularly bad is hard to isolate, but many administrators point to a number of conditions that raised the inebriation levels of the crowd: the event was held on a Friday night during reading period, the students started drinking earlier in the day, and this year's sophomores had never seen an Olympics and might have felt a greater need to "prepare." As for the issues of harassment, Rockefeller College Master Michael Jennings says, "I think the two biggest factors were the crowd's insistence in getting close to the runners and the change in attitude by and toward women." Jennings points out that when women first started running in large numbers, they tended to run together out of one of the entryways, take a lap, and then duck back inside. This year, women were scattered through the crowd, and, he says, "Many women were so drunk they couldn't control or defend themselves." SHARE's Waronker, who has long had reservations about the Olympics, says, "I don't think you can put those ingredients together and expect everyone to be safe."
President Shapiro has asked Montero to form a committee, which will make a set of recommendations that he and the trustees can consider early in the spring semester. Several administrators admit that it's a forgone conclusion that the committee will recommend banning the Nude Olympics, and the committee's real purpose will be to help galvanize student support for such a ban. As this issue of paw went to press, the trustee subcommittee on alcohol abuse expected to hear reports about the Nude Olympics at its meeting on January 24 -- reports that may influence the subcommittee's own set of recommendations.
Montero says it's too early to tell if the university will take disciplinary action against any students for their roles in the Olympics. All the hospitalized students have been released from the Princeton Medical Center, and most of the campus has returned to the more normal pressures of exam period. But some members of the community are finding the events of that Friday night harder to forget. As Carrasco says, "When you see students you work with, care about, and teach, out there drunk, passed out, or ... . How do you go to class the next day and work with them?
"I am ashamed for Princeton."
-- Wes Tooke '98
Dante in many media
Robert Hollander '55 translates "Inferno" and puts Dante on the
Web
Robert Hollander '55 is a strong believer in text-based learning. In teaching Dante's Divine Comedy to undergraduates for the last 30 years, he has required his students to memorize the first 27 lines of the poem -- in Italian -- and to familiarize themselves thoroughly with 200 passages from the work.
With the advent of the Internet, Hollander has gone from text to hypertext. The Dante scholar and professor of Romance languages and comparative literature has put together the Princeton Dante Project, an online compendium of materials about the works of the 14th-century Florentine author of the Divine Comedy. The site includes the English and Italian text of the poem, an audio reading of it in Italian, Hollander's own commentary, links to other commentaries, and illustrations by 19th-century French engraver Gustave Doré and 20th-century Italian lithographer Amos Nattini. In the process of constructing the site, Hollander has embarked on a task he thought he would never undertake: a verse translation of the Divine Comedy, whose three parts, "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso," detail Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and the sinners and saints he encounters along the way.
Hollander was spurred to create the site several years ago after talking with Susan Saltrick '78, a former student, and Robert Stein at Voyager Software. Hollander won funding from the Mellon, Delmas, and Cone foundations and received substantial "in-kind" support from Princeton, whose Center for Computing and Information Technology has been heavily involved in the project. In all, nine people -- "the great Dante number," says Hollander -- have worked on the Website.
HUSBAND-AND-WIFE COLLABORATION
The 10th person is Hollander's wife, Jean, a published poet and Hollander's collaborator on the translation. Originally, Hollander had planned to use John Sinclair's prose translation of "Inferno," the same version he uses in his course. He was reworking it for the site when Jean seized her husband's copy of Sinclair for two days in February 1997 and emerged with a translation of Canto I -- after which the couple spent a year translating the entire "Inferno." Anchor Doubleday expects to publish the poem in the spring of 2000, and the Hollanders eventually hope to translate the rest of the Divine Comedy.
Drawing on the fruits of his own career studying and writing about Dante, Hollander is also writing a commentary on the poem with links to other commentaries. This project is proceeding much more slowly; he's finished work on only the first six of the 34 cantos in "Inferno."
Both because of the resources put into the site and the need to maintain it, Princeton wants to make some money from the site. It plans to charge universities several hundred dollars for a site license. Colleges would pay half that, and individuals could sign up for under $100. "I have mixed feelings about charging for it," Hollander says. On the other hand, he adds, "I don't have mixed feelings about charging for a textbook."
In refining the site, Hollander had a readily available group of respondents: the students in his freshman seminar on "Inferno" this fall. The novice Dantisti report that the site is useful -- especially when writing papers -- and that their use of it increased during the term. Two students also noted that the audio version is helpful in memorizing the opening lines of the poem, an exercise Hollander considers among the most useful in his course: "Students write me all the time saying they've gone to Italy and been invited to dinner by someone because they've recited the opening lines of 'Inferno.'"
Hollander himself is ambivalent about the impact the site has on his teaching. "The freshmen seem to have more information," he says of his current students. "They're familiar with what I've said after they read the Website." His concerns are, first, that students may not appreciate the need to struggle with Dante when the text is so easy to navigate with a mouse, and second, that they may lose themselves in a sea of commentary: "Problems that took me 10 years to observe are presented in half an hour. This takes a lot of the fun away, wrestling with a tough piece of text and coming up with a nugget after that struggle. Now the nuggets are already in a string around some of their necks."
-- David Marcus '92
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