Harvard Social Life Sparks Media Frenzy

Across the globe, it seems the media cannot resist a story about Harvard students having fun. Or at least trying to.

After reading the past year’s press coverage about Harvard’s purported social struggles, one might get the impression that Cambridge’s elite scholars are in fact quite dull.

Time and time again, their social shortcomings have been well-documented in newspapers from the San Diego Union-Tribune to the Shanghai Star.

But being the apple of the world’s scholarly eye is both a blessing and a curse, as Harvard attracts the globe’s top students while drawing intense scrutiny for seemingly insignificant reasons.

Over the past year, the local and national media have made claims, with varying degrees of veracity, investigating and reporting on kids in crimson doing their very best to have fun.

“I don’t know, but it seems like for whatever reason a lot of stupid stories are getting picked up because they have the name Harvard in them,” says Walker C. Stanovsky ’06, social chair of the Mather House Council and coordinator of this year’s Mather Lather foam party in April.

After The Crimson reported that a number of Mather Lather attendees developed rashes traceable to the foam machine used to pump suds onto the dance floor, national news outlets, including the Drudge Report, picked up the story.

“We put in a ton of work and we threw a great party, but The Crimson gave us poor press and that led to poor press across the country,” says Stanovsky, who is also a Crimson editor.

Harvard students partying wrong proved to be an irresistible story.

Last November, the indefatigable work of the Boston Police Department also caught the media’s attention, when a number of Harvard (and Yale) students were chastised by police at the Harvard-Yale tailgate for unruly behavior including public urination and underage drinking.

The following Monday, the Boston Herald splashed a banner headline across its front page declaring the football game revelers “HARVARD HOOLIGANS,” though in fact, not one current Harvard student was among those arrested at the tailgate.

The media fascination with Harvard continued in late March, when survey results revealed that Harvard students were less satisfied with on-campus social life than kids at 30 other universities. The data came from 2002—before the creation of the “fun czar” and the Dean’s Office’s renewed commitment to improving Harvard’s social scene—yet the Boston Globe story used the present tense to describe the poll’s implications and did not mention the survey’s date until the sixth paragraph.

After all, why focus on social security reform or the war in Iraq when Harvard kids aren’t having fun?

Ultimately, the most prominent Harvard social life story of the year centered on an administrator, not a student.

The College hired a “fun czar” to teach Harvard students how to have fun. Right?

Not exactly. Zachary A Corker ’04’s position as special assistant to the dean for social programming was actually created to help student groups navigate University Hall’s administrative bureaucracy to plan social events of their own.

Corker says the title “fun czar” was neither accurate, nor of his choosing.

“The Harvard Gazette was the first to use it,” Corker says. “They threw it in as a teaser on the first page.”

“It’s a brutal title, but it sticks like glue,” he adds. “It won’t go away.”

Newspapers around the world picked up a Reuters story about Corker, and college publications—at Dartmouth, Brown, Brandeis, and more—published articles about Harvard’s supposed social struggles and the man hired to resolve them.

And not all Corker’s press was favorable, or even neutral. The Boston Herald referred to Corker as a “boozing bozo,” while Bill O’Reilly on FOX News called Corker’s job “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day” on Jan. 14.

For Harvard, it can be lonely at the top. After all, who wants to make fun of number two?

­—Staff writer Sam Teller can be reached at steller@fas.harvard.edu.