Growth of Student Groups A Concern

Harvard Community Outreach and Public Service (Har’d Corps) didn’t exist before Stephen N. Smith ’02 came to Harvard.

Neither did Boston Area Students Involved in the Community, the Harvard AIDS Coalition, the Community Careers Initiative or the Diversity Movement—all groups Smith founded or helped to found.

During his four years on campus, Smith helped keep these groups afloat, leading countless meetings and advertising events with his trademark ASCII art e-mails.

He was one of about 25 students who occupied Mass. Hall for three weeks to protest for higher wages for Harvard employees. In the fall of 2000, he ran for Undergraduate Council president.

“I really love meetings. I want to be an organizer when I grow up, so this was my best education and where I wanted to put the most time,” Smith writes in an e-mail.

But Smith graduated last spring and he’s now in Botswana doing AIDS advocacy work, far away from Cambridge and his student groups.

While the groups grew under Smith’s attention, now the question is whether they will live beyond his graduation or disappear like countless other student groups before them.

And although Smith may be the most visible example, he’s not alone in his desire to organize students into new groups.

At a school that attracts students with reputations for leading extracurriculars, students and administrators say they are concerned about the ever-expanding number of groups on campus—but they’re reluctant to take action.

To Be or Not To Be

Starting a new group is a strikingly simple process.

Students must create a constitution, a list of officers and recruit 10 members and two faculty advisers, according to The Handbook for Students.

They submit all this information to the Committee on College Life (CCL), a group of students, faculty and administrators that meets two or three times per year to approve new student groups.

The process is so lax that Associate Dean of the College and Co-chair of CCL David P. Illingworth ’71 said last spring he could not remember the last time CCL rejected a student group.

CCL approved 28 new groups last semester, bringing the total number of student groups to 250 for about 6,600 undergraduates, making Harvard’s student group-to-student ratio significantly higher than those of other schools in the area.

Boston College (BC), for instance, currently has about 9,200 undergraduates and 230 registered student groups. Compared to Harvard’s one group per 26 students, BC has one per 40.

Even with its smaller group-to-student ratio, BC has taken action to curb the proliferation of groups on campus.

Two years ago, administrators called for a moratorium on all new student groups, according to Dean for Student Development Robert A. Sherwood.

Sherwood says the moratorium was well-received by most students, except for a small minority who were frustrated about being unable to start new groups.

BC has since replaced the moratorium with a more selective process similar to Harvard’s.

Currently, becoming an official BC group requires 20 members, a mission statement and a constitution.

To limit the number of short-lived groups, seniors are no longer permitted to found new student organizations.

The administration acts similarly to Harvard’s when it comes to granting the final approval.

“Once a group has gone that far through the new process, we’re likely to approve it,” Sherwood says.

At Tufts, the low-key process has spawned a worrisome number of short-term groups, says Assistant Director of Student Activities at Tufts, Edmund T. Cabellon.

There are 160 registered student groups for about 8,600 undergraduates and student groups must acquire 15 members before being granted temporary approval. In the last step of the process, a committee of students chooses to approve or reject the potential group. Although the school hasn’t taken any action, Cabellon says the process should be less liberal. He says the current system negatively impacts the few groups that could remain for the long-run.

“I think it limits the authenticity of organizations that could have a longer life span than their original founders,” Cabellon says. “But it’s a common challenge that happens at colleges across the country.”

Boston University (BU) currently has 411 student groups for a student body of about 17,000 undergraduates.

The university requires new groups to obtain five members before receiving the approval of the director of student activities.

Linda Keltner, executive secretary at BU’s Student Activities Office, said that, like Harvard, the university approves 20 to 30 new groups per semester. Many groups, she says, especially special interest groups with a narrow focus, tend to disappear after their founders graduate.

If You Can't Join 'Em, Found 'Em

If Harvard is searching for the nation’s future leaders when it admits applicants, then perhaps it’s only natural for students to arrive at the College ready to start a new group, Illingworth says.

“We tend to admit people who were used to leading things,” he says.

And Smith, who founded or co-founded five groups in his time at Harvard, says the lifetime of a group shouldn’t be the primary concern.

“Though it is true that many groups and projects may not last the long term, I have yet to hear a good argument as to why this is a bad thing. If anything, college should be a time to try new things, make mistakes, and learn from them,” Smith writes.

But Assistant Dean and director of the Phillips Brooks House (PBH) Judith H. Kidd, who oversees all of PBH’s 80 public service programs, says she worries about the limited number of volunteers for existing groups as students continue to found new ones.

She says she explains her dilemma to students who seek her approval in starting a new community service group.

“In public service, we’re dealing with a limited number of volunteers and scarce resources. I try to get [students] to consider looking at other groups that do similar things, but rarely does this succeed,” Kidd says.

President of Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) Laura E. Clancy ’02-’03 says PBH includes many student groups that address the same issue—college preparation, for instance—but that they fail to collaborate.

“The University has to figure out ways to retain student autonomy but at the same time cultivate a culture of evaluation where students take a step back and think about their mission,” she says.

But Smith questions why student groups should be expected to remain the same from year to year—since the student body itself changes.

“Because the campus community is changing so rapidly [with] 1,600 undergraduates coming and going every year, I think it becomes less important and less sensible to have just a few sturdy organizations that people can volunteer for and move on from,” Smith writes.

Lindsay N. Hyde ’04, founder of Strong Women, Strong Girls, a self-esteem development program for girls in grades three through five, says that as long as students recognize a need for the new group, then the group warrants the College’s approval.

“One of the things everyone needs to be really aware of is whether there is a need for this group, how it will impact the people the group will be working with,” she says. “Had we looked around and said there are six other programs partnering elementary school girls with students, then it may have even been detrimental to found the group.”

I Will Survive

And even though there are more than 12 a cappella groups currently on campus, that seemingly daunting figure didn’t stop the Fallen Angels from emerging on the a cappella scene a year-and-a-half ago.

Current president Sarah Calkins ’04 says the group is continuing to grow and expects that it won’t disappear anytime soon.

“I look forward to coming back for our reunion concert,” Calkins says.

Calkins says that Fallen Angels’ all-female membership and specialty in contemporary music distinguish it from its competitors.

“I think we’re the most radically different a cappella group that has formed in the past 10 to 15 years,” Calkins says.

Karen C. Kwok ’05, a member of the Radcliffe Pitches, says that while she thinks there are too many co-ed a cappella groups on campus, the College could use even more single-sex groups.

“I don’t feel like there’s a shortage of people,” she says.

But Illingworth says that even with the different specialties of each group, he’s concerned that, at some point, quality begins to suffer.

“With a cappella groups there are many styles of music, [but] in a sense I worry about stretching the musical talent too thin,” Illingworth says.

As for the survival of his public services groups, Smith says he imagines “some will [last], some won’t and some will probably change over time.”

Lauren E. Bonner ’04, current president of Har’d Corps, says the organization is continuing to grow, despite Smith’s absence.

The group still sponsored its First Year Day of Service last Saturday and, for the first time, collaborated with PBHA to expand the event.

“I think Har’d Corps may be taking different directions than it has in the past, but that’s proven to be the nature of it. It sort of reinvents itself,” Bonner says.

Hyde says she is already taking steps to make sure that volunteers for Strong Women, Strong Girls will be able to run the group after her graduation.

She says she gives the volunteers a planned curriculum to use with the elementary school students during the first 10 weeks of the program and then lets the volunteers create their own curricula for the last six weeks.

“It gives them practice, and it gives people a real ownership of the program,” Hyde says.

And Illingworth notes that some groups fade from the campus scene not because their founders graduate, but because their causes become outdated or unnecessary.

For instance, Illingworth points to the Harvard Coalition for Drug Policy Reform, approved by CCL last spring.

“If marijuana were legalized, they probably wouldn’t exist anymore,” he says.

And while Illingworth says “it’s hard to tell” whether many groups disappear after their founders graduate, he maintains, like Smith, that the benefits of Harvard’s 250 student groups outweigh the costs.

“CCL is very receptive to new groups. We don’t want to be overly regulatory,” he says. “It’s much better to be less regulatory and not stifle the spirit that’s out there.”

But he recognizes the risks.

“Even in this community, talent can get spread thin,” Illingworth says.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.

—Anne K. Kofol contributed to the reporting of this story.