Ivy Club

The Ivy Club is the oldest eating club at Princeton University, and it is "still considered the most prestigious." It was founded in 1879 with Arthur Hawley Scribner as its first head.

The Club, as described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise (1920), is "detached and breathlessly aristocratic," a description which continues to be accurate to this day. A more recent account described Ivy as the "most patrician eating club at Princeton University" where members "eat at long tables covered with crisp white linens and set with 19th-century Sheffield silver candelabra, which are lighted even when daylight streams into the windows."

The Club was one of the last to admit women, resisting the change until Spring 1991 after a lawsuit had been brought against Ivy Club, Tiger Inn, and Cottage Club by student Sally Frank. The members of each class are selected through the bicker process, a series of ten screening interviews, which are followed by discussions amongst the members as to whom of the remaining to admit. Current undergraduate members host regular "Roundtable Dinners" featuring talks by faculty and alumni.