Cut the Comp

For freshmen and many upperclassmen alike, Harvard’s many organizational “comps” have already commenced. These semester-long boot camps for students wishing to join a particular extracurricular are intended to weed out the resume padders and instead court the most committed “compers” to execute the organization’s missions in the years to come. But an unintended consequence of the comp design is the stomping out of dissenters who object socially or ideologically to an organization’s existing dogma. These individuals can be invaluable to guiding an organization in fresh directions; by eliminating them, overzealous comp processes are weakening student organizations in the long term.

In his book “Going to Extremes,” Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Cass R. Sunstein argues that in cases where free exit exists for members in a group, group discourse tends to produce more extreme views. Collectively, a self-selecting group is prone to arrive at a more polarized view than to which even the median member may subscribe individually. This idea is exemplified at Harvard, where the comp process encourages unnatural polarization in club ideologies. The method of self-selection is the comp, which is in many ways advertised as a chance for the comper to feel out whether a club is the right fit. Difficult and involved comps suggest a rigid “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude that counters the idea that organizations should be truly freethinking and open to fresh ideas and new members. A comp suggests a four-month timeframe for a newcomer to conform to the traditions, mindsets, and workings of an organization’s social and ideological scene. In many cases, it is a vehicle to vetting prospective members on the basis of personality qualities over actual competency. It defaults existing institutional memory as dictating an organization’s future, although new and prospective members should be the ones responsible for shaping the organization in future years.

There are certainly right approaches to recruiting club members, but the excitement shown at the Activities Fair at Hilles can wither when compers later fall out of line with a club’s existing dogma. If student organizations eased up on their comp processes, then they would retain more students who simply do not like or see the point of jumping through hoops to gain entrance to an organization; they would gain students less wedded to existing bureaucracy and procedure and more open to changing the organization and making it stronger. The perpetuation of organizational homophily vis-à-vis the vetting of new and different members serves only to build more extreme and polarized groups at Harvard—niches that, in the end, are detrimental not just to organizations but also to individual members’ abilities to encounter new and diverse people and viewpoints in their time at college. Student leaders should strive to expand their organization’s ideological bases also to better serve the personal needs of members, in widening their intellectual experiences in college.

While organizations like The Crimson may need comps to ensure that prospective members gain the skills required, the emphasis placed on this admissions process should be lessened. New members should be integrated further into an organization earlier, and given the free agency to scale involvement. While it is appropriate for the executive boards of organizations to have stringent competency requirements, for general membership these requirements and hurdles should be lessened. Harvard extracurriculars should be about meeting more, different people and if institutional barriers hinder this, they should be removed for the greater good.

Ashin D. Shah ’12, a Crimson photo editor, is an Applied Mathematics concentrator in Pforzheimer House. He is the co-president of the South Asian Association.