Harvard Isn’t Fun Enough. That’s No Laughing Matter.

It has been said that Harvard is not fun.

I can’t say I fully agree. I love my time here, and that includes my weekend evenings. Harvard is no University of Alabama — nor even Dartmouth College — but you can usually find a place to crack a White Claw or cut a rug.

And when you can’t, well, at least the people are interesting. With company like theirs, a worn wooden table in a dimly lit corner of Grendel’s Den — which is, of course, every corner of Grendel’s — will do just fine.

But, even from behind my rosé-colored glasses, I have to admit: Our stein does not runneth over. Harvard has a serious fun problem.

It’s tough to get rigorous about this sort of thing, but it seems Harvard has a less vibrant social scene than peer schools. More specifically, it has fewer of the big, brash parties that have for decades created community among and offered release to overstressed college students.

In a moment where more young Americans than ever before feel hopelessly alone — and where far, far too many are dying from it — that’s a major problem.

When we talk about partying, we’re talking about the opposite of the optimizing culture that makes so many people our age anxious.

It’s about the small act of resistance involved in rejecting the planned and the productive to revel with people you love. Indeed, watching people gather weekly to sway, sing, and raise their arms to the sky, you’d be forgiven for confusing parties with church (the sexual mores, of course, being an important discontinuity).

If your first reaction to these words is to discard them as silly or overdramatic, then you might just be beginning to grasp my point: Even those of us who love fun instinctively resist thinking of it as worthy of serious consideration.

That’s wrong. Fun is no laughing matter. It is an institutional imperative for students to be happy and socially connected. A mental health crisis fueled by record loneliness is what happens when we act like fun is not an essential, soul-nourishing part of the human experience.

So why do our fetes falter? I see two things dimming the Friday night lights.

First is that the final clubs aren’t built to spread the fun. At most schools, it is institutionalized social groups — fraternities, pre-professional organizations, and the like — that are the front-line funmakers. Regularly throwing good parties isn’t easy, so it takes formal, coordinated groups to pool the resources and gather the people.

At Harvard, it’s the final clubs that fill this role, but they have significant limitations.

Either because they’re hamstrung by their graduate boards or because they prefer not to, only some of the clubs host parties with any frequency. Of those that do party, many bar or heavily restrict attendance by non-members. For the all-male clubs, which throw most of the parties, non-member men are persona non grata, freshmen especially so.

There also just aren’t that many people in final clubs. In a 2016 Crimson survey, just 17 percent of graduating seniors reported belonging to final clubs. Another survey, from The Crimson's Flyby Blog in 2013, found that final club members are disproportionately likely to be white, straight, wealthy, athletes, or legacies.

Basically, the final club problem is a numbers problem. It is an unhappy accident of history that the organized funmakers at Harvard are small groups that throw a small number of parties for a small number of people. (At Yale College, by contrast, traditional Greek life handles the partying and secret societies, which have themselves become more accessible, cover the hoity-toity elbow brushing.)

The second redwood-sized stick in the mud is administration.

To the people tasked with regulating our social environs, it seems fun isn’t worth the trouble. Partying kids do stupid things, and that means danger for students and liability for the University. Meanwhile, fun figures as an abstract, distant consideration for administrators who aren’t privy to our collegiate social lives.

It is this imbalance — the internality of risk and the externality of fun — that helps explain how University administrators can possibly find it acceptable to crack down on drinking at the Harvard-Yale tailgate or allow midterms on Housing Day, as happened this past year on two of our most cherished days of fun.

And, often, the University’s attempts to swim upstream produce perverse outcomes. It may have intended to curb dangerous drinking at Harvard-Yale; instead, it likely drove student celebration to unofficial settings lacking resources to mitigate risk. For another example, its sanctions on single-sex social organizations were intended to advance gender equity; instead, they triggered a mass die-off of all-female final clubs while deep-pocketed all-male clubs largely lawyered up.

Between these failures and the effects of a mental health crisis on a campus where wait times for therapy can exceed a month, trying to prevent fun seems a liability far greater than the debauchery itself.

Even if a more fun campus were riskier, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want one. It would also be less risky by far to equip all students with gently lit, cushily padded, WiFi-enabled cells from which to conduct an education. But that is not a school — it is an asylum.

So, would-be partiers, resist the ennui. If your organizations don’t throw parties, convince them to change that; if they do, seriously consider whether they can be bigger and less exclusive. When administrators kill the joy, let them know that you are dissatisfied.

Far too much of the wonderful, capacious human experience is lost when we denominate every decision in terms of risk. Living fully is worth getting hurt. No more of this death by a thousand quiet nights — turn up the music.

Tommy Barone ’25, a Crimson Editorial Comp Director, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.