Look Beyond the Coursebook

When the Class of 2006 came to Harvard, we were greeted with a series of ominous warnings. A letter from then-Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 instructed us to “slow down” and limit our involvement in extracurriculars; a speech by Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby advised us that “You are here to work, and your business here is to learn.” President Lawrence H. Summers, never one to mince words, succinctly derided Harvard’s extracurricular-heavy culture as “Camp Harvard.”

Now that Lewis, Kirby, Summers, and many others in the university administration have almost departed, and as the curricular review moves (hopefully) towards implementation, the College would be well served by taking a hard look at its attitude toward extracurricular activities. Efforts to remove extracurriculars from academia, experience shows, are non-starters; a far more achievable and positive goal would be to put a little more of academia into extracurriculars. Rather than seeing the two as oppositional, with X hours going to one or the other, we should encourage the many ways in which they can be complementary.

Throughout the course of the curricular review and the brouhaha around Summers’ resignation, we’ve been constantly reminded of the dearth of student-faculty interaction on this campus. While solving this problem in the purely academic sphere is daunting given our institution’s extensive inertia, far fewer hurdles stand in the way of making progress on this divide through the extracurricular route.

Unfortunately, the same approach-avoidance mentality that characterizes student-professor interaction often governs student group-faculty collaboration. With some notable exceptions, faculty advising of student groups often extends little further than signing a form once a year. There is no easy fix for this, but there are a number of ways the situation could be improved, principally by creating long-term mechanisms for student-faculty interaction that extend beyond individual students.

First, the administration should relax the rules on who can be a faculty adviser so that groups can choose advisers on the basis of who would be best, rather than who has the requisite academic rank. Currently, a group must have two advisers, both from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS): one an officer and the other a voting member. This requirement can often make it difficult for a political group, for instance, to seek out a Kennedy School professor as an adviser. Further, the requirement that an adviser be a voting member of FAS forces groups to solicit higher-profile, busier advisers over lower-profile advisers who might have more time to spend with the group.

These roadblocks aside, both student groups and faculty should make an effort to inject greater meaning into the adviser-advisee relationship. Rather than seeing faculty advisers as annual suppliers of signatures, they should regularly seek out and meet with their advisers for advice both specific (connections to job opportunities or a desired speaker) and general (the direction of the organization, information on the organization’s field of focus), perhaps establishing a regular meeting time to ensure frequent communication.

Student groups should also make an effort to get their advisers to interact not only with the organization’s leaders, but also with its members. For example, The Harvard Salient adviser Professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 recently went on a croquet outing with the staff: “I stayed until I was just overcome with pleasure,” Mansfield told Fifteen Minutes. This kind of interaction, free from the strictures of grades and assignments, could be a far more rewarding model of student-faculty interaction, especially if supplemented by an educational component. If nothing else, it would be another source of recommendation letters.

Beyond the advising realm, there is more that extracurricular groups can do to contribute to the College academic experience. Student groups regularly fly in guests from all over the world to speak at their events, often overlooking the great number of potentially fascinating speakers available here on campus. Events with faculty speaking on their areas of interest to members of the group require no travel arrangements, and could be an easy way to infuse some academic substance into a group’s work.

Additionally, departments might seek student group collaboration in planning public lectures and getting students to attend, casting such events as extracurricular attractions rather than academic burdens. Finally, departments might offer extra office space to groups whose work relates to their field, potentially creating a real bond between students and academics that could lead to collaboration valuable to both.

Currently, extracurriculars occupy a sacred sphere on this campus, where students learn from each other, free from overbearing administrative governance. Surely, such a culture should continue; strict regulation of student group activities would be counterproductive. Just as lecture halls are the realm of the professors, extracurriculars are the realm of the students; through them, students have the freedom to pursue their own interests, and often do so with more enthusiasm than they might bring to regular coursework. But extracurricular involvement and academic engagement need not be mutually exclusive; if faculty take a greater role in this world, meeting students on their own terms, both students and faculty might discover that they have more in common than they think.

Greg D. Schmidt ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.