Tiger Inn - The Tiger Inn Membership

The Tiger Inn Membership

(see also "Notable Alumni" below)

Tiger Inn is a selective club, meaning membership is awarded after successful completion of a process called bicker. During bicker, prospective members interact with current members who then convene to vote on whether the prospective members should "receive a bid," or be invited to join the club.

The club has designated its 26 original founding members as "Charter Members:" at the time of the club's founding, these members were known within the Princeton University community as "The Sour Balls." The Active Membership is that portion of membership that uses the clubhouse on a daily basis and is composed principally of Princeton undergraduates, although graduate students have also been active members from time to time. Alumni Members frequently return to the Tiger Inn. The club also has two honorific categories of membership to recognize and honor those who have had a positive and notable association with the club, whether as members of the Princeton University community or as individuals whose principal affiliation with the Princeton community is their association with the Tiger Inn.

Tiger Inn's membership was once described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise (1920) as "broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest elaboration of prep-school standards." In a 1927 essay on Princeton for the magazine College Humor, Fitzgerald elaborated: "Tiger Inn cultivates a bluff simplicity. Its membership is largely athletic and while it pretends to disdain social qualifications it has a sharp exclusiveness of its own."

Fitzgerald's comments were written during the time that Princeton University, and so the membership of each of the Eating Clubs was all male. Princeton first admitted women as undergraduates in 1969 and the various Eating Clubs eventually became coed. Debate over co-ed Eating Club membership on Prospect Avenue abounded from 1969 until 1991, before which Tiger Inn had been all-male. The club became the last selective club to offer membership to women. Prior to the decision of the undergraduate club membership to open its membership to women, other selective Eating Clubs had gone to court to defend the practice of banning women from their ranks. For example, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Frank v. Ivy Club that the failure to open membership to women violated the state's anti-discrimination statute. In modern times, the membership of The Tiger Inn is distinctly coed, and the club's membership and leadership, including members of both its Graduate Council and the undergraduate officers have included many notable Princeton alumnae and female students, respectively.

The full membership of the Club, including all living alumni, have met three times to commemorate anniversaries of Tiger Inn. The highlight of the club's fiftieth anniversary celebration was the publication of the club's first official history, written by Charlie Mulduar and released in March 1940, just before America's involvement in WWII. The club's seventy fifth anniversary was held on December 9, 1965, at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York. The celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the Club began in 1988 with a small informal meeting of 40 alumni at the Princeton Club of New York who began to plan the Centennial celebrations. The Centennial Celebrations peeked with the Club's Hundredth Anniversary Dinner held on October 20, 1990 at the Hyatt in Princeton, following which many of the alumni insisted on continuing celebrations at the clubhouse. The Centennial celebrations were concluded by the subsequent publication of the second club history entitled The Tiger Inn of Princeton, New Jersey, 1890 - 1997.