Under the Big Tent

Harvard may have built its reputation on academic excellence, but it is the College’s extracurricular scene that has left a lasting impression on many students.

Students come to Harvard because they want the best of both worlds—they want to challenge themselves inside and outside the classroom.

As the College heads into a broad review of its curriculum and pedagogy, faculty and students will have to determine how this widespread participation in extracurricular activities should inform their thinking. They will have to consider what role extracurriculars should play in a Harvard education, and whether any lessons can be gleaned from the popularity of non-academic pursuits.

While some carry into the curricular review sweeping philosophies on the importance of extracurriculars in education, others have less developed and more cautious views. Almost all acknowledge the benefit of vibrant extracurricular options, but there are differing opinions on the proper balance, or even the need for a balance, between academics and extracurriculars.

As a result, it is still unclear what the future holds for extracurriculars and their place at Harvard.

Joining the Circus

During World War I, University President A. Lawrence Lowell feared that the “sideshows” were overshadowing education, the big tent event at Harvard, according to Secretary of the Faculty John B. Fox Jr. ’59.

Though the imagery of a circus might be lost on the current generation of Harvard students, Fox says he cites Lowell to illustrate that the concern over the balance between academics and extracurriculars is not a new phenomenon.

However, Lowell’s answers—which included the advent of concentrations and the House system—provide few clues about the present, as today’s student body does not much resemble the Harvard of his time.

Over the last few decades, the number of student groups has skyrocketed to over 250 and undergraduate participation has increased as well.

Most Harvard undergraduates are involved in one or more significant extracurricular activities, according to the 2000-2001 Harvard College Report by outgoing Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68.

The report indicates that nearly 70 percent of students participate in some form of athletics, 40 percent engage in music or the arts and about 60 percent devote time to public service activities.

The admissions process has no doubt influenced the increased extracurricular activity on campus. Students arrive at Harvard with diverse talents and a drive to explore.

“The fact is that Harvard makes such an effort to attract students who have not only good grades and scores,” says former University President Derek C. Bok. “We do increasingly get a student body [with students] who even by the time they get here have abilities as musicians, student leaders and journalists.”

While Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 reaffirms that “the bread and butter of this place is academic excellence,” she says that in selecting students the admissions office looks for evidence of a student’s “capacity for development” at the College and later, as a citizen.

“We are educating, or we are trying to educate whole people who aren’t just disembodied intellectuals,” she says.

McGrath Lewis says that the admissions office can guarantee a class of students who can obtain all A’s in their courses—this, she says, is not a difficult task to accomplish.

However, McGrath Lewis says she keeps in mind the 25-year reunion books sitting on a shelf over her desk, what she calls the first returns of her work.

“We are looking for people who use their talents for others,” she says. “The hard thing is to admit people who will be contributors.”

“[Involvement in high school extracurricular activities] shows evidence we care very much about here, which is ambition and motivation and the ability to get up in the morning and exercise the talent,” she adds.

Unlike its neighbor MIT, Harvard’s admissions office is less willing to bank on the “folder,” admissions shorthand for a prospective student, with only the promise of “untapped potential,” McGrath Lewis says.

“The person who simply reads books, who doesn’t have much to show for it, will have a hard time distinguishing themselves from the [applicant] pool,” explains McGrath Lewis. “We are a little bit more like people from Missouri. We are ‘show me’ kind of people.”

Students choose to come to Harvard for a variety of reasons which include its reputation for academic excellence. But for many undergraduates, the rich extracurricular scene enables them to develop academically and to pursue the outside passions that made them stand out in the competitive applicant pool.

Professor of Education Richard J. Light says an emphasis on extracurriculars has resulted in a campus where students “enthusiastically rush from activity to activity.”

Some of these students are often willing to put their extracurricular responsibilities ahead of their school work and when they do, they elicit mixed responses from professors.

“Almost half of my faculty friends think that students haven’t kept their eye on the ball,” Light says. “The other half would say this student followed her passion.”

President of the Undergraduate Council Rohit Chopra ’04 says that Harvard students are aware that they have finite time to devote to their academic and extracurricular activities.

With this time trade-off in mind, students often choose to participate in the endeavor they find most rewarding, he says.

While at times this activity is academic work for a small class with a great professor, Chopra says it is often outside of the classroom that students feel most fulfilled. “This sort of created this dynamic where in many ways extracurriculars are a good threat to academics. It sort of taught Harvard we need to reinvent ourselves if we want a good extracurricular and a good academic scene,” says Chopra.

A Threat to Academics?

On a campus filled with talented, impassioned students, College administrators struggle to make the curriculum as engaging as extracurricular life.

The College is and should be “clear with students that academic obligations come before extracurriculars,” Lewis wrote in a February memo to Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby.

“But statistics, and 25th reunion reports, don’t lie: at Harvard, we do a better job with nonacademic life than with academic life,” he adds.

Kirby says extracurriculars are valuable because students say they are.

“Our students are talented in multiple dimensions: in scholarship, in the arts, in athletics, in the leading of organizations. I believe that activities beyond the classroom are important because they are important to the students,” says Kirby, who is also the faculty adviser to the Chinese Yo-yo Club, wrote in an e-mail.

Though he says he is committed to extracurriculars and believes they have their place in undergraduate life, Kirby stresses that students come to Harvard because of its academic reputation and it is the College’s primary responsibility to provide a high-quality education.

“Extracurricular activities may enrich the life of this and other colleges, but college is a serious place for education. Students are drawn to Harvard with the primary expectation of receiving an education of very high caliber and, in time, an A.B. degree,” Kirby says. “I don’t believe that is an extracurricular activity.”

“How many would come, simply to play sports, write for a student newspaper, or sing and act, and not get a degree? At Harvard, that percentage is vanishingly small,” Kirby adds.

Kirby has made similar points in public as well. This fall, at a speech welcoming first-years to Harvard, Kirby emphasized that academic work is central to the Harvard educational experience.

“You are here to work, and your business here is to learn,” he said in his September address.

Others however, have articulated more complex philosophies to justify attention to extracurriculars in an educational context and to explain their unique draw.

In a 1999 memo to then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, Lewis provided three reasons why he believes extracurriculars are important to Harvard: they enhance education, provide a center for social life and keep students out of trouble.

“I am using broad language in calling these experiences ‘educational’ but it’s a fact that, even for many of our academic stars, the hours spent being theatre techies made dramatic literature part of their lives, and the time spent in the Veritones taught more about teamwork, and contract negotiations, than any course could have done,” Lewis wrote to Knowles. “We need to respond to [students’] developmental needs and the full range of their interests and talents, not just academic ones.”

Lewis observed in a February memorandum addressed to Kirby that “many internal observers of the Harvard scene” employ “hydraulic and mechanical metaphors” to explain how students’ energies should be focused on academics.

“People often say that the energy students put into extracurriculars should be ‘diverted’ or ‘channeled’ into academic activities, or that extracurriculars should be limited so as to provide better ‘balance’ with academic activities,” he wrote. “The image is that students’ attention, energy, or at least time is a finite resource, and that the way to focus more of it on academics, and thereby improve undergraduate education, is to limit the amount that can be spent extracurricularly; the excess will inevitably wind up in the academic sphere.”

But he argues against the theory that academics and extracurriculars are locked in a zero-sum game and instead questions, “Why we have the problem in the first place that our academic life is less satisfying to our students than our extracurricular offerings.”

“Looking at the academic side in isolation doesn’t get to the root of the issue; it isn’t just that academic life is not good enough and needs improving,” he wrote to Kirby.

Lewis says that interpersonal interaction is the key draw of extracurriculars, and one of its prime pedagogical benefits.

“The thing that students almost always do when involved in extracurriculars that they almost never do when in their academic lives is to work together with other students,” Lewis adds.

After interviewing over a thousand Harvard students, Light wrote in his 2001 book Making the Most of College that when asked to identify a “specific, critical incident...that changed them profoundly, four-fifths of [students] chose a situation or event outside of the classroom.”

Lewis says that in meeting after meeting with alumni, they warmly recall their college memories outside of the classroom.

Asked to reflect on her first-year at Harvard, Andrea M. Ellwood ’06, whose outside commitments include singing a capella in the Veritones and tutoring, responds without hesitation that it was in an extracurricular activity that she discovered her niche. “My a capella group was what made this year amazing,” Ellwood says. “The friendship that I got out of that...really brought me into the College more than any of my classes.”

Light says these extracurricular commitments can enrich student experience and education by offering alternatives to a structured curriculum and opportunities to develop life skills. He also surmises Harvard students appreciate the chance to “set the agenda,” an opportunity which some extracurricular activities provide. “When students are in classes they are carrying out the professor’s assignments, whereas in just about every extracurricular activity, students create their own assignments from scratch,” Light says.

Light and others say students are taught leadership and teamwork skills in their extracurricular activities—qualities that are often hard to exercise in a classroom setting.

“You don’t get to be a leader sitting in the ninth row, taking notes,” Light says.

Extracurriculars also have implications for the Harvard education in a grander sense.

“In addition to being a source of enjoyment...extracurriculars are collaborative activities, teaching about how to work effectively with others, how to play by rules of leadership or followership,” Bok says.

Alex S. Captain ’06, who is involved with the International Review and works with the Model United Nations organizations on campus, also says extracurricular activities prepare students for the future.

“Extracurriculars show what you can do outside of school and show that you have the common sense and leadership ability. That kind of shows you can get things done in a real-world context,” Captain says.

Integration by Parts

Light says that students who are able to integrate their outside interests with their academic pursuits are the ones who most relish their college experience.

“Some of the happiest students that I’ve had here at Harvard have used their extracurricular activities as an opportunity to connect what they do outside the classroom with things they are learning inside the classroom,” he says.

Ben T. Jackson ’03 echoes this sentiment as he considers his most rewarding college experience. For a linguistics paper this year, he was able apply his knowledge of vocal percussion, an education he developed singing co-ed a capella with the Callbacks.

“That was a really cool tie-in for something that I wouldn’t have learned how to do if I hadn’t done an extracurricular,” he says.

Often the solutions proposed for a perceived disconnect between academics and extracurriculars involves some form of formal integration.

Some have suggested that the restructuring of the College administration to consolidate the responsibilities of undergraduate education and student life in one office will help to break down the separation between extracurriculars and academics.

“It seemed odd to me to have one office in charge of extracurriculars and another office in charge of curricular policy with respect to the arts and nobody in a position to sort of bring them together,” University President Lawrence H. Summers said in an interview.

Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71 also envisions a better integration of academics and extracurricular activities.

“I hate to see academics and extracurriculars in a way pitted against each other,” Illingworth says. “People should be relating their studies to what they do. It’s not what you do, it’s how you reflect on it academically. There’s not going to be credit per se for doing community service, but there are ways in which it all comes together and can be combined with academics.”

Chopra offers his own plan for merging academics and extracurricular activities. He hopes for more formal faculty support of student organizations.

“It’s unfortunate that in many ways we’ve created a system where you have to pick between your school work or your academic work and your nonacademic work because there’s not a better connection,” he says. “I think there needs to be more organized frameworks that are better connected to faculty and alumni.”

However, some—especially those involved in the arts—have been wary of a marriage between extracurricular interests and academic coursework. Critics worry that with a more formal structure some students who have less experience, or a more casual interest in an extracurricular will be crowded out.

Lewis says the solution of simply offering academic credit for extracurricular activities misses the point.

“There is a tendency, mistaken I believe, to propose bridging the extracurricular and academic realms by literally merging them—perhaps giving academic credit for public service activities, or making better efforts to bring extracurricular theatre experiences into course in literary fields,” Lewis wrote Kirby in February.

Lewis says administrators should take as a lesson from extracurriculars’ popularity the importance of encouraging students to build relationships with other students around a given activity.

“What would be a good idea, I think, is to find ways to encourage students to work together while studying whatever the normal academic subject matter of the next curriculum will prove to be,” he wrote.

Looking Forward

So far Kirby hasn’t revealed a grand plan for curricular review in general or answered the most pressing questions regarding where his vision leaves extracurriculars.

However, some students are concerned that with all this talk about academics, extracurriculars will be de-emphasized.

“I was a little concerned this year when we had a lot fewer auditionees than normal,” says Jackson, who served as the music director for the Callbacks and CityStep, an after-school dance program. “I sense there is an increased attention from the administration to focus on academics…and I fear that students might think that they can’t put extracurriculars ahead of academics.”

Jackson acknowledges that the decreased interest in the Callbacks and CityStep could have been an anomaly this year. But he says he worries about the future of extracurricular activities because the success of many student groups depends on the willingness of their leadership to place academic work on the “back burner.”

Chopra says stressing solely Harvard’s academic experience ignores the diverse talents of the student body.

“There needs to be a better understanding of students as a whole instead of just academic creature and non-academic creature,” says Chopra. “I don’t want to see just a strict focus on academic life.”

—Staff writer Nalina Sombuntham can be reached at sombunth@fas.harvard.edu.