Student Groups Get Web Support

As part of a battery of changes that will increase oversight of student groups this fall, the College has created online sites for groups to register each year and to request event space.

Assistant Dean of the College Paul J. McLoughlin said that College officials opened the event-registration site—which will eliminate the need for paper applications—to students and House Masters on Sept. 5.

The application, which updates questions based on groups’ responses, will mean that each application is customized to the event that is being registered.

“If you are flyering in front of the Science Center, it is quick and easy,” McLoughlin said. “If you are having a campus-wide event with alcohol, it’s a little more complicated.”

The change, which will cost $11,000, was the result of student requests, Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd said.

The registration software automatically sends the application to anyone who needs to approve it, such as House Masters and the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), McLoughlin said. In addition, he said that the software would inform users if their request complied with College regulations and estimate the cost of a HUPD detail or Beverage Authorization Team (BAT).

The change is the first of several to the way that the Office of Student Activities will conduct business this semester.

In November, all student groups will be required to re-register online, which will create a database containing contact information for officers and the group bylaws. While this has been the policy in the past, it has not always been strictly monitored by the College, McLoughlin said. In the past, he said, some student groups had lost copies of their bylaws and in some cases lost track of their bank account information.

The online registration program will make it easier for the Committee on College Life (CCL) to examine new proposals for student groups, McLoughlin said.

It will enable the College to determine which organizations have become “defunct,” in which case the College will contact the members and work to reform the group, McLoughlin said.

Kidd said that she and McLoughlin had inherited a “dysfunctional” system of monitoring student groups, which they will be working further to change this October, when a new committee will investigate how Harvard oversees student groups.

As a starting point, the committee will likely examine a baseline report on how colleges organize and support student groups, compiled by the Office of Student Activities during the summer.

The report, which examined 15 peer institutions, found that Harvard has more groups in proportion to its student body than most other private universities. Harvard has one student group for every 21 students, and that number counts “umbrella organizations,” such as the Phillips Brooks House Association, as one group.

The report suggests that Harvard may be approaching a “critical mass” of student groups.

“I think we are on the heavy side in terms of student groups,” Kidd said. “We have to look at what is critical mass so we don’t run out of student volunteers or staff.”

Undergraduate Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 also said last spring that the number of new student groups is a concern for the College. “The proliferation of new student groups does harm existing groups,” he said.

Although University President Lawrence H. Summers said yesterday that the large number of groups indicated the range of undergraduates’ interests, he cautioned that some groups might have formed simply because students wanted better titles.

“The richness and variety of extracurrular life is a great strength of Harvard,” Summers said. “You know, I sometimes wonder whether there isn’t some fragmentation into multiple organizations caused by the desire many students have to be the leader of an activity. More clubs means more presidents.”

The report calls for more staff for the Student Activities office, noting that 80 percent of other colleges surveyed have at least five staff members in their equivalent offices. The report suggests hiring more interns who are studying higher education administration from the Graduate School of Education rather than hiring full-time employees because it is significantly cheaper to hire interns.

“Our experience last year with an intern was positive and our experience with our summer intern was amazing—we get a lot from them,” Kidd said.

Following one recommendation of the report, the committee is likely to examine a system that permits several different levels of recognition for student groups—a system that several other universities with high student group densities currently use.

—Staff writers Stephen M. Marks and Lauren A.E. Schuker contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Joshua P. Rogers can be reached at jprogers@fas.harvard.edu.