A “Czarry” Excuse for Fun

Every year the campus’s Fun Czar oversees the planning of the Freshman Formal along with the First Year Social Committee, a group of eager frosh hand-chosen by the fun czar and Freshman Dean’s Office. (Elections for the committee were quietly ended in 2007.) My sophomore year, as vice-chair of the College Events Board, I was lucky enough to chaperone the swanky formal at the Charles Hotel, where freshmen enjoyed an open bar of soft drinks and bottled water. Unfortunately for fun at Harvard, the Fun Czar at the time forgot to request that, at a certain point, the bartenders serve tap water instead of bottled water as had been done historically. Consequently, the Fun Czar herself admitted that the tab for bottled water alone neared half of the original budget for the event and accounted for a significant portion of the social programming budget for all of Harvard’s undergraduates that year. Rather than being fired, the Czarina was asked to remain on U-Hall staff for another year in the Office of Student Life.

I mention this disaster not to embarrass the fun czar but rather to highlight the overarching problem with the czarist regime that has been at the heart of every social programming nightmare for the past five years: First-year Harvard graduates are generally ill-equipped to manage the minutiae surrounding oversight of an entire campus’s large-scale social events. From navigating thorny contracts to responsibly allocating a six-figure budget at a notoriously decentralized University, the position’s responsibilities are complex and demanding enough to challenge even a veteran professional event planner.

Although the College Events Board and FYSC exist nominally to help the Fun Czar in planning campus-wide events, the Administration empowers the overstretched Czar with real control of all social programming. A case in point: The CEB is not allowed to enter into any contracts surrounding campus events or even have much to do with their scheduling. In years past, they have been told simply that certain events must occur each year, left only to devise the frilly details of the gatherings. The iron fist of social programming is entrusted only to recent Harvard undergraduates, as the administration feels that only a former Harvard student could navigate the complex social and administrative bureaucracies on campus. This “Harvard-only” mentality, I should note, was also espoused by Drew Faust’s adversaries in opposition to her presidential bid. (She never received a degree from Harvard and is, by all accounts, doing just fine.)

Insider reasoning and concentration of power might make sense if the Fun Czar were both competent and, well, fun. Unfortunately, the position has gone lately to those who focused primarily on endearing themselves to University Hall staffers during the job hunt. All six of the previous Fun Czars have been white students, and lately they’ve been cut from the Crimson Key/House Committee/Harvard Concert Commission cloth—students who found more delight in the now-defunct Disney Singalong program than they did in increased funding for Yardfest artists. To compound the problem, this general wonkiness has been accompanied by an overarching ineptitude, from mismanaging security contracts to completely ignoring public relations. Since the post pays poorly and requires the fun czar to stay on campus while most friends move on, it seems unlikely that those drawn to apply face a choice between that spacious office in New York and a dank cubby in the basement of University Hall.

These shortcomings of competence and diversity are both annual and entrenched, but not impossible to remedy. The administration might try publicizing the position more widely to attract new candidates for the application, or it might move the application deadline from the spring to the fall so that the position would draw interest from students who still have all their options open. It might look outside of the Harvard undergraduate population for a more experienced event planner to hire; the additional salary expenses would be more than offset in money saved by avoiding needless monetary waste. Most radically, University Hall might even begin allowing those undergraduates elected to lead social programming to have some real authority and input in shaping the year’s social calendar. While failure to enact these suggestions might not incite a revolution in the Yard, reevaluating a position that originally stimulated campus social life might combat the torpor that has recently characterized undergraduate involvement in campus-wide events.

Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. He is a former vice-chair of the College Events Board. His column appears on alternate Fridays.