I wrote my first article for the Columbia Daily Spectator on October 5, 1979. It profiled Columbia University’s marching band, a ragtag and highly irreverent ensemble composed of kazoos and beer cans as well as clarinets and bassoons. Its repertoire included a musical tribute to birth control, featuring the songs “I Got Rhythm” and “I Hear You Knockin’ (But You Can’t Come In).” While the band boasted a few “outstanding players,” one member told me, most were “average” or below. And there were no tryouts. “We’re not stuffy, official, or in the least regimented — we’re really just out to play our music and have fun,” a drummer explained.
If all of that sounds like a mixtape from another era, it should. Especially at our elite colleges and universities, student activities have become regulated and competitive. They’re yet another form of achievement, demonstrating “skill” and “teamwork” and “leadership.” And the ones that are just for fun are falling by the wayside.
Witness the recent travails of Columbia’s marching band, which the university banished this semester. (The band was reinstated on Friday but will now be supervised by the university.) The pretext was the band’s failure to file paperwork on time. But the writing was on the wall last year, when the university cut the band’s funding by 60 percent. Columbia had planned to form a new band after the football season ends, with a music director and — yes — tryouts for performers. “Our ultimate goal is to put the best possible band on the field,” the athletics director explained.
The brutal, zero-sum competition doesn’t end after you get in to college; in some ways, it gets even worse.
That’s a perfect encapsulation of the overall student-activity philosophy right now on our elite campuses, where everything — and everyone — is supposed to be “the best.” Many student organizations require written applications and interviews, exactly as admissions offices do. The brutal, zero-sum competition doesn’t end after you get in to college; in some ways, it gets even worse.
So at the University of Virginia, one parent posted on College Confidential, her or his son had been rejected by a student group that supports the basketball team. (“And you couldn’t find a bigger basketball fan!” the flabbergasted parent wrote.) Think about that for a moment. We’re talking about a voluntary organization devoted to pumping up enthusiasm for a sports team. But you can’t just walk on. You must earn your way in, just as you do for everything else.
The rejected UVa student started his own club after he was rejected. Taking all comers at first, it had a hard time recruiting members. Then the student got wise to the system, and required people to submit applications. Overnight the number of interested candidates quadrupled. “That was just part of the culture of UVa,” his parent wrote.
But it’s hardly unique to UVa; it’s part of elite-student culture writ large. And it extends even to service organizations assisting the less fortunate, which themselves have begun to engage in a rat race. At my own institution, the University of Pennsylvania, I was astonished to discover that a group sending students to visit Alzheimer’s patients required applications and interviews.
When I suggested to several students that anyone should be able to join, they replied that nobody would want to participate on those grounds. And they might be right, which is the most upsetting idea of all. To get accepted by groups like this one, you typically have to write an essay about how you want to “give back.” But unless the group will give you a leg up, why bother? That which is good is also competitive; and that which is not competitive cannot be good.
To its credit, Penn has tried to rein in some of the most unsavory aspects of this system: Student organizations may not collect résumés from first-year students, for example, nor may they require “specific attire” during early-round interviews. But even those restrictions speak volumes about how far student activities have descended into the survival-of-the-fittest hell that permeates our elite colleges. Although résumés cannot be solicited from freshmen, the Penn rules add, “a list of activities may be requested on a written application.” Really? To participate in a student club?
I defy anyone to show that competing in every activity is good for our students. Applying to college, they learned that life is a kind of Hunger Game: The only way to continue is to beat out someone else. And once they get here, we pit them against one another yet again. Should we be surprised that so many students are exhausted and stressed out?
Thankfully, a few colleges are starting to reform. Harvard has announced a campuswide assessment of “comps,” Cambridge-speak for the applications that many student groups require. At Northwestern, an “Inclusive and Barrier-Free Student Organization Engagement Initiative,” rolled out in 2016, requires student groups to adopt open-admissions policies.
But Northwestern stops short of denying recognition to groups that fail to comply, which is what needs to happen. If a group of students wants to take applications and conduct interviews, of course it should be free to do so. But if it wants our recognition — and, especially, our resources — it should be open to all.
Admittedly, varsity athletics wouldn’t work if everyone got to play. There might be a few other exceptions, too, for highly skilled activities with limited slots. But in most cases, we should require official student groups to accept everyone. And if there isn’t enough room — say, on the van taking students to visit Alzheimer’s patients — then the organization should simply draw lots to determine who gets to go.
When I showed up at the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1979, there was no test or competition to “join.” If it didn’t like what you wrote, of course, the paper wouldn’t publish it. But you didn’t have to be anointed as a member of the club in order to participate.
Now you do. According to its website, the Spectator invites reporter candidates to fill out an application; students interested in graphics and photography are “encouraged to submit a portfolio in addition to the written application.” Then “selected applicants” will be “notified of potential interview opportunities” with leaders of the newspaper.
In my junior year, I was elected editor in chief of the Spectator. If you had told me to interview an aspiring reporter, I would have laughed out loud. Anybody was welcome to write for us, but nobody had to be one of us. We didn’t see ourselves as “a professional community” providing “meaningful personal and professional growth” and “networking opportunities,” to quote the present-day Spectator website. We were just kids, trying on life for size.
And that let us take chances, in ways that are often denied to today’s students. You could cast your net widely, without worrying about where it would land. And you didn’t have to be “good” at something in order to give it a go.
Six years after I wrote about the Columbia marching band, the Spectator ran another story about it, by a freshman named Neil Gorsuch. The future Supreme Court justice interviewed a band member, Liz Pleshette, who played the spoons and reminded him that “spooning” had other, well, earthier connotations. “It was a reflection to me that I’d landed at a university where it was OK to be yourself,” Pleshette recalled recently.
I don’t think that’s enough any longer at our elite colleges. You must be the best, at whatever you do. And that just makes me unspeakably sad.
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, which will be published next year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
