Behind the Meritocracy

Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, future president of the United States, described it years later as the greatest disappointment of his life. Someone--he never learned who--had black-balled him, vetoing his membership in the Porcellian Club, at the turn of the century the top rung in Harvard's rigid social ladder. Heartbroken, the young Franklin had to settle for the Fly Club and the Crimson presidency instead.

In FDR's time, the final clubs were the center of an undergraduate's life at the College. As we read about it now, the elaborate club system that dominated student life in those days may seem absurd: prospective members had to go through dozens of rounds of selection and rejection before reaching the elusive clubhouse of choice.

But some things never change. Harvard students today may not spend as much time debating the relative social merits of the A.D. and the Fly as they did in 1903. But if you substitute student groups--which to a large extent have replaced final clubs as the cornerstone of students' identity--for the clubs, Roosevelt would feel at home. Harvard students still love a good hierarchy. And, sadly, the institutionalized pecking order of many Harvard student groups is oftentimes just as silly as the turn-of-the-century final club scene seems to us now.

Of course, none of the student groups clamoring for new recruits in Tercentenary Theatre at Monday's activity fair would admit as much. In fact, most go out of their way to stress what a low-key, unstructured organization they are.

But with a handful of exceptions, these claims are nonsense. Maybe it's involuntary, a subconscious urge, but Harvard students are simply incapable of avoiding hierarchies and exclusivity.

For instance, a few years ago, as a wide-eyed first-year, I thought I was interested in public service. So I went to the student activity fair, found a group that sounded interesting and put my name on their list. A few weeks later, at the introductory meeting, I was told that before I would be allowed to volunteer my time in one of the lowliest positions in the organization, I would have to fill out a lengthy application and go through an interview. Apparently, there's not enough poverty for just anybody to fight it.

Such is the perverse world of Harvard extracurriculars. Organizations you might think would want all the help they can get still put their members through layer after layer of selection. I cannot count the number of rounds of interviews and applications I've gone through since that September. First-years beware, it will happen to you; stick around long enough, and you might even get to interview someone who once interviewed you.

It would be one thing if the purpose of this rigmarole actually were to make sure students were qualified before giving them positions of responsibility. But as often as not, the process is unnecessary; it exists for its own sake, to give us another chance to evaluate, interview, rank, vet, accept and reject one another. Just like the old days.

The difference is ostensibly that the hierarchies in today's student groups, publications, government simulations, and such, unlike the elitist final club scene of Roosevelt's time, are based on merit. But anyone who has ever applied for a position and seen it go to a friend or roommate of the student making the decision knows this isn't true.

In that sense, things have gotten worse. Roosevelt didn't know who rejected him from the Porcellian, but he and everyone else knew why: that person, whoever he was, just didn't like Roosevelt. No one would have pretended there was any other reason.

Now, instead of transparent favoritism and elitism, we have something worse: the illusion of meritocracy. We waste countless hours--and reams of paper--elaborately pretending we're not just as likely to pick our friends and cronies as were our Gilded Age predecessors. Ironically, the final clubs, no matter what you think of them, are now some of the most honest organizations on campus. Everyone knows getting in is about who you are, who you know and where you're from.

I won't pretend to have an explanation for the rampant and enduring desire to impose hierarchies on student life. Maybe it's four years of high school, years that many of us treated like a giant scavenger hunt for college application fodder, that trains us to think that way. Maybe we're all just massively insecure.

Some things never change. Somewhere, some future president in the Class of '03 is about to suffer the trauma of rejection from Harvard Model Congress, or Let's Go, or any one of the selective student groups on campus. He or she is probably going to think it's because their writing sample wasn't good enough. Maybe, in their innocence, they'd never think it had something to do with whom the person who got the post is dating, or where they went to prep school.

Franklin Roosevelt would know better.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. His column will appear biweekly.