Activities fair: bigger but not better

As you approach the building, you see fellow freshmen buzzing around. Some are alone, while others approach with awkwardly assembled friends from OA/CA and zee groups, still not quite there yet in the friendship dynamic but desperately trying. The whole atmosphere is buzzing. The Activities Fair really is a showcase for the University to strut the glut of student groups it facilitates and funds and an opportunity for students to pitch for their organizations and recruit potential members. It’s a festival-like environment, with dance groups performing, sports clubs donning their jerseys and Quipfire! parading in their red shirts, probably saying funny things. Everyone seems warm: The groups welcome one and all, irrespective of talent levels, and the students consider the myriad choices in front of them. A precursor for the four years ahead, it seems.

Not quite. With two years of experience and three separate Activities Fairs under my belt, my outlook on the fair and what it represents is a tad more cynical. There are two major factors contributing to this.

First, the now widely documented idea of false representation about the levels of competition for joining a large chunk of student organizations. Walk by the Nassoons’ table in Dillon Gymnasium on that first Friday, and the smiles on members’ faces will be wide and genuine enough to convince you that you don’t need to be the next Pavarotti to be one of them. While that is still probably true, the skill level required to be a Nassoon, or dance for disiac, or get a role in the Shakespeare Company’s fall show is incredibly high. That itself is not a problem, and perhaps something one should expect from a college such as ours. However, the false advertisement of their accessibility feels like cheating. As an addendum, it would be heartening to see more groups with reduced or no skill levels required for entry. After all, college is as much about learning new skills as it is about polishing current ones. The Lobster Club is a good start, and hopefully others groups will follow suit.

The more systematic issue with the fair again has to do with being misled. A quick, cursory glance around Dillon will make it easy to conclude that there is a very large number of student organizations. Yet, a closer (and more critical) look offers interesting insight. There is very little diversity among the categories of organizations. Take out the four broad categories of performing arts, sport clubs, political activities and finance/business-related groups, and students are left with very limited options.

This does not mean that there aren’t other avenues of activity on campus. There is a botany club, an anime club, a film society and even a brewers’ society. A comparison of the size and scale of these organizations, however, both in terms of membership and funding, with their more established counterparts in the ‘big four’ outlined above, shows a clearer picture. Student organizations, meant to be avenues for channeling student interest in fields beyond coursework, are too narrow in their scope.

There is one very intuitive justification for this. These organizations did not descend from another community. They are the student-created, student-run and student-managed, and only exist insofar as the student community takes interest in them. The fact, then, that certain groups are more popular than others is simply the result of student demand for them.

There are two issues with this. First, student demand is not an adequate justification. In a lot of cases, demand is not directly caused by interest and is more influenced by how exclusive a group is (think back to the Wilson School when it required admission by application), which tends to make competitive Princeton students pine for it more. Moreover, the relationship between the organizations and the student community is not one-way; it is a reflexive system, in which student demand not only determines but is also determined by current student organizations. When entering a culture with numerous dance groups and more business organizations than residential colleges, students are more inclined to ‘develop’ an interest for them.

Second, from the University’s point of view, student demand is not the only parameter by which decisions should be made. There should be a more proactive stance on student organizations to help mold demand and interest in ways more in conjunction with University aims, one of which must be a more diverse set of activities.

As an example, the Pace Center for Civic Engagement activities fair outside Dillon is a great initiative, but it is important to not let it branch out as a fifth “big” category, leading us back to square one. That will be the peril with any attempt at diversifying unless we reach a stage where there is such a large number of popular categories of activities that a sense of diversity is achieved almost by default. Until then, most of the excitement around the Activities Fair will remain specious.

Ali Akram Hayat is a philosophy major from Lahore, Pakistan. He can be reached at ahayat@princeton.edu.