Publication: A Princeton Companion
Student government did not begin at Princeton until the turn of the century, but its essential spirit was evident years earlier. In James Madison 1771's time, the debating and literary societies, Whig and Clio, were governed entirely by undergraduates, and their strict parliamentary rules were sometimes applied with severity to erring faculty graduate members. During Woodrow Wilson 1879's undergraduate years, athletic, literary, and musical activities were all student-governed, and in the 1890s a later generation saw the beginning of another form of undergraduate self-government -- the student-controlled honor system in examinations.
Princeton's first formal agency of student government, the Senior Council, was founded in June 1905 on the initiative of undergraduates in the Class of 1906 and welcomed by President Wilson as a means of calling leaders of undergraduate opinion into consultation with trustees and faculty ``upon matters of moment in which it was not only proper but desirable that authority should wait upon opinion.''
Although the Senior Council profited from the experience and influence of its members, its weakness was its lack of continuity; each year its membership was entirely new -- a disadvantage that became particularly apparent in the 1920s when, after the Council had failed to produce an acceptable system of regulations for the safe use of automobiles by undergraduates, the trustees issued an edict forbidding student car use after July 1, 1927. The 1927 Senior Council thereupon resigned, and although the reason given was that they had not been properly consulted, the underlying difficulty in President Hibben's view was one of continuity and the Council's understandable reluctance to make decisions ``which would not affect their own liberty but would affect only their successors.''
The following fall, an Undergraduate Council representing all four classes was formed to replace the Senior Council. Among the products of its forty-year existence were a marriage course for seniors, chartered flights to Europe, an extension of Firestone Library hours, an increase in carrel space for upperclassmen, and the end of required chapel attendance. The Council also agitated successfully for the repeal of the edict prohibiting student use of automobiles, the improvement of club elections, the development of alternative social facilities, and the extension of curfew hours for women visitors in dormitories.
The late sixties and mid-seventies found Princeton student government in a state of flux. In 1967 the Undergraduate Council gave way to a larger Undergraduate Assembly designed to provide wider student participation through the campus-wide election of representatives from dormitory areas and the scheduling of frequent meetings open to any undergraduate who wanted to attend. According to one student observer, the Assembly was ``more constructively vocal'' than the old Council. But the operation of the larger organization proved unwieldy, attendance fell off, and in time, the Assembly, like its predecessor, was being criticized for its failure to effectively represent student opinion, and was accordingly superseded in 1975 by a body known as the Undergraduate Student Government.
The new organization gave more power to existing committees on academic matters and undergraduate life and to the projects board, and replaced the old Assembly with the Undergraduate Caucus, a smaller deliberative body made up of student government officers, committee chairmen, class presidents, Class delegates, and the undergraduate members of the Council of the Princeton University Community.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).