Thu 4 Oct 2007
Let me get out EphBlog’s time machine (last used here) and predict that the Cluster Cup (Record news and editorial) will be a total failure.
Although Williams’ Cluster Cup may lack the flying broomsticks, talking portraits and invisibility cloaks characteristic of the Hogwarts competition, the new neighborhood-wide tournament is not without its own charms. In launching the year-long Cluster Cup tournament, Neighborhood Governance Boards (NGBs) are showing that community involvement is still possible without Harry Potter hocus-pocus. Just a month into its second year, the cluster system is making noticeable strides thanks to the initiative and creativity of student leaders.
To us, the competition’s appeal lies in its wide array of events. Not limited to sporting contests, NGBs have lined up a number of events, from tennis and softball games to Texas Hold ‘Em and chess tournaments. While this weekend’s inter-neighborhood volleyball match may have catered to the more athletic students, clusters with a disproportionately high concentration of mathletes will likely find themselves on the winning side in certain future face-offs. As a result, the Cup can draw in a broad cross-section of students, promoting neighborhood pride amongst residents with diverse interests.
Few things are more delusional than a Record editorial in full flight. This will never work.
First, Williams students are very busy. The notion that they have nothing better to do than watch intramural contests is ridiculous. Second, the students who would, in theory, organize these events are even busier. Finding enough people to field a frisbee team takes time. You think that neighborhood leaders like Remington Shepard and Jon Prigoff have a lot of time on their hands? Think again. Third, arranging competitive one-time competitions is very hard. Although poker talent might be evenly distributed among the clusters, it is unlikely that neighborhoods will be equally good at gathering it for any specific event. Unequal talent will result in non-competitive contests, not much fun for the losers or the winners. One of the great wonders of the centralized intramurals of years passed was that the teams were so even that almost every game was fun and exciting.
Fourth, even if students did have the time, they wouldn’t care. Students do not feel, and will never feel, any meaningful attachment to their Neighborhoods. You can not have group identity within the Williams community for all the reasons that I have cataloged ad nausem. Our architecture is too dispersed. Our dining halls are not integrated with our houses. More than half the juniors leave the neighborhood system to JA or go abroad. More than one third of the seniors live in co-ops or off-campus. Few members of Wood will care who wins the volleyball competition because few members of Wood care about Wood. They care about their friends, their teammates, their classmates and their fellow Ephs, in that order.
Fifth — and this is the last reason, I promise! — it is impossible to maintain a series of one-time events. Maybe if the Neighborhoods played volleyball every Friday afternoon, or whatever, some stability might emerge. Students could plan for the event. Organizers would have not to start from scratch each time. But if each activity is a one-off, there will never be any momentum.
Don’t believe me? Already, it is not working.
Though the volleyball match successfully set the Cluster Cup into motion, attendance was not as high as had been expected. “I’m chalking it up to people not knowing much about the whole thing yet,” Currier said.
Whistler, meet graveyard.
Because there is no set method for creating teams to compete, neighborhoods are responsible for fielding their own teams. So far, neighborhoods have recruited students by sending an e-mail to everyone in the neighborhood, encouraging people to sign up. “Ideally, in the future there will be competitions within the neighborhoods to determine who represents the neighborhood,” said Jon Prigoff, president of Wood Neighborhood. He also hoped that there would be enough interest to have B and C teams in athletic tournaments to increase active student participation.
Didn’t I debunk this sort of stupidity 2 years ago? Why, yes I did!
Most troubling, however, is President Schapiro’s prescription from the Alumni Review.
Each house will have a governance structure, faculty associates and funds for programming. Intramurals will again be organized by house.
“again”? I am not certain what this means. Although there was some intramural activity organized by house in the 1980’s — I think that broomball was only a house-based competition along with perhaps a few other sports (basketball?) — 95% of actual intramural games had nothing to do with houses. Post-fraternities, has there ever been another system? I don’t think so.
More importantly, is Morty saying that he is going to dismantle the current intramural system, that if you want to play intramural soccer (and you live in the Wood Cluster), you will have no choice but to play on the (one?) Wood team? That doesn’t seem to make much sense since there are many more student within the Wood cluster of 275 who want to play soccer, basketball and so on than can fit on a single team. I guess that you could restrict participation via try-outs or whatever and that this would lead to a higher level of play, but I can’t imagine that anyone favors this. (Then again, I couldn’t imagine the depth of support in the Administration for Anchor Housing itself.)
I guess that Morty might mean that IM Frisbee will still have 10 or so teams — How many does it have now? — but that those teams will be organized by House. That is, if you live in Wood and want to play frisbee, you need to play on one of the 2 or 3 Wood teams. I certainly prefer this option to the only-one-Wood-team choice, but I don’t see it as very stable. Certainly, at places like Harvard and Yale and all (?) the other House-based colleges that CUL loves to idealize, there is only one intramural team per house. Given that there are a dozen or so houses, this seems like a natural outcome, although it does lead to Harvard, for example, having no more IM soccer players than Williams despite being three times the size.
Could Wood House maintain 3 IM frisbee teams? I doubt it. After all, the CUL will be constantly trying to instill House spirit and (friendly) House competition. Let’s all go to the Quidditch Match! Well, to the extent that this works — and it may work a bit — there will be pressure to, you know, win. Wood House, or at least the folks in charge of intramurals at Wood House, will want to win the IM Frisbee Cup. How will they do that? Not by distributing their frisbee volunteers randomly among their three teams, much less by ensuring that the three teams are equal in talent. The way to win the IM Frisbee Cup will be, you guessed it, to put all your best players on one of the three teams.
Other houses will, presumably, want to do the same. Once a single house does it, others will be left with few options. After all, House spirit will be running strong! Then, how many people will want to keep on playing on the 2nd tier teams, teams that have no change against the best team from their own house or the number one teams from the other houses? Not many, I suspect. The obvious result will be that the frisbee league goes from a dozen teams to 5, one for each house. Moreover, even this isn’t very stable since it is hard to have a real league with only 5 teams. People interested in IM sports like to play those sports several times a week. Are the 5 frisbee teams going to play each other over and over again?
Now, the College might try to avoid this fate. It might try to force houses to distribute their frisbee talent equally. But such a top down scheme is very hard to enforce. How is Doug Bazuin going to know who the good frisbeers are? Even worse, gung-ho houses can avoid the dilution of their first team by “encouraging” the less talented athletes to go out for something else. “Why don’t you sign up for public speaking! We already have enough people going out for frisbee.”
Given that anchor housing and the concomitant Hogwartization of Williams is inevitable, what’s the right answer? How might we preserve and extend all that is best about IM sports at Williams while allowing Morty/CUL to incorporate IM competition in their hopeless attempt to generate house spirit?
Simple: Have two parallel and complimentary IM systems. There should be an IM soccer league run by the Office of Campus Life that is college-wide and centralized. Anyone can sign up. Captains are recruited. Teams are created fairly, perhaps even with some bias toward house unity, but with the primary focus being equality of talent. There should also be a special House competition tournament, also run by OCL that would be house-based, perhaps even requiring that the players also be a part of the college-wide league. It would feature a single tournament, perhaps over a brief period, with prizes and lots of College publicity. Morty and the CUL might attend these games.
As always, if it were me, I would just have the first sort of league. Yet at this stage, I’ll be happy if we can just prevent IM sports from being too screwed up by anchor housing.
I like to think that the failure to have any IM soccer games in September was organizational stupidity rather than malicious intent. Here’s hoping!
No matter how talented our Office of Campus Life bureaucrats, no matter how hard-working our NGB leadership, neighborhood competition is doomed to failure. You read it here first.
12 Responses to “ Doomed To Failure ”
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May 8th, 2008 at 12:48 pm[...] Last fall I claimed that the Cluster Cup competition was doomed to failure. Has it failed yet? How many events were there this spring? How many people participated? How many [...]
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October 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am[...] it just last year that I predicted the demise of the Cluster Cup? No matter how talented our Office of Campus Life bureaucrats, no matter how [...]
October 4th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
If I were 20 years old again and attending Williams, it is my current assessment that I would have zero interest in the Cluster Cup or anything like it - it seems to me that it is “soft”, insubstantial and immature in nature - but then what does a superannuated, curmudgeon know?
October 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Even though lots of free, high-quality food and alcohol were provided last year, turnouts for “neighborhood events” were abysmal in wood neighborhood. Usually gatherings were made up of a handful of the students actually living in Wood house, and a handful of freshmen that had wandered in out of curiosity.
The only “neighborhood” events that were well-attended were the ones that involved a keg, and freely admitted residents of other neighborhoods to enter… i.e. a standard williams, non-neighborhood event.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
I am 20 years old, I do attend Williams, and I do not have even the slightest interest in the cluster cup. So Frank, you are correct. In fact, none of my close friends beyond my pick group even live in my cluster. I may not be superannuated, but when it comes to clusters I am very curmudgeonly.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
As an ‘07, I can honestly say that social life at Williams improved pretty significantly with the advent of the cluster system. That said, the cluster competitions in my senior year (last year) had very little investment. While broomball was built around the neighborhoods (and in my opinion, far more awesome for it–my floor had a team and I am close to 100% sure that we would not have were it not for the neighborhood system) most everything else either flopped or just didn’t really impact student life much.
HOWEVER, I disagree with you David. You say: “Students do not feel, and will never feel, any meaningful attachment to their Neighborhoods. You can not have group identity within the Williams community for all the reasons that I have cataloged ad nausem.” It’s happened before. Why can’t it happen again?
“Our architecture is too dispersed. Our dining halls are not integrated with our houses.”
–No, the architecture is not perfect. However, it’s pretty good–if Dodd and Tyler were separate clusters and something a little better was done with Wood/Spencer (minor tweaking would probably do), I think we’d have more than enough unity…unity that conveniently arranges itself around dining halls (Currier almost exclusively eats at Driscoll, The Dodd quad almost exclusively eats at Dodd, the Tylers and Thompson almost exclusively eat at Mission, and Spencer/Wood almost exclusively eat in Greylock. THe only exception are when people eat in Paresky, which *gasp* was intentionally built to bring the campus together).
Anyways, I don’t want this to become an argument about this aspect of cluster housing. Personally, David, I think you’re too far out of college to have much of a perspective of how it works anymore.
Instead, I’m more interested in the article about the neighborhood competition. I’m pleasantly surprised to see what’s planned and am a little jealous that I’m not a student anymore to experience it. Do I honestly expect the cup to work or for all of the events to fly? No. However, 16 total teams (and 64 total student participants) for a volleyball tournament sounds like a very solid turn out (lack of spectators or not).
What excites me the most about the neighborhood system is not necessarily the community that may or may not eventually come from it (which, as I’ve pointed out before, nobody with any common sense would expect to form for another several years). What excites me the most is the innovation that it appears to be causing. Campus life and ACE in many ways was stagnating my frosh and sophomore year and the Neighborhood system has been an incredibly surprising fix for that. Not everything has worked, but last year at least there were some unbelievably successful events that were directly tied to the system. The Dodd neighborhood’s trick-or-treating and haunted house was the biggest community-college success I have EVER seen at Williams, and I doubt Gunther or possibly even Vanilla Ice would have come to Williams had it not been for neighborhoods (Vanilla Ice was ACE, from what i remember, but one of the things the Neighborhoods did was take much of the pressure off of ACE to allow them to think more ambitiously and outside of the box than they had in the past).
Whether or not people “care” about the neighborhoods in a meaningful way, I would argue that the changes have been almost exclusively noticeably positive.
Finally, David, I think we both agree that the Office of Campus Life is not always competent. They are not the neighborhood system, but instead, a recommendation from the CUL two years previously, largely as a means of bi-passing changes of the sort of the neighborhood system. I would argue that with the advent of the neighborhood system, much of the OCL (although not all) should go the way of 4 person pick groups. Please keep your criticism of these two entities (the OCL and the Neighborhood system) separate–I can promise you that they often butt heads around campus, at least last year.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:27 am
One point in response to Current Eph ‘07.
You talk about the tangible improvements to the campus scene. While I think you somewhat overstate your case, much of what you say is true. But I think you miss something crucial here: these improvements didn’t happen as a direct result of any of us being destined to spend the rest of our time here in any one corner of campus. They happened because there are now some more people and a lot more (admin, not Student Activities Tax) dollars invested in throwing events.
As an aside: OCL is the organization that oversees the neighborhoods, so far as I know. Given this, how can one not link the two? While certain cluster leaders may, from time to time, butt heads with The Man, how could the neighborhoods and OCL ever be institutionally at odds?
October 5th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Andrew is absolutely correct. The Williams social scene didn’t suddenly improve last year because clusters were better able to plan events. Instead, it was the influx of tens of thousands of dollars in extra cash that the administration earmarked “to make the cluster system a success” that improved social life.
I would argue that if those tens of thousands of extra dollars were given to student groups — ACE, CC and others — before the cluster system was created, social life would have been at least as good, if not better. (Perhaps it would have been better because it would have been totally student driven instead of the pseudo-administrative mandate that exists now.)
The over-planning, over-management, and bureaucracy that came with the creation of OCL is anti-Williams and the College’s long-standing belief in student-driven student life where students take ownership, leadership, and actually invest in their community.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:17 am
I disagree. The scene improved because there were way more people planning in a new context. ACE and CC had more money than they could deal with before the clusters…the problems have almost exclusively been man-power problems at Williams (and I would argue, even with the addition of NGBs, continue to be man-power-related…it sounds like the NGBs are doing a better job delegating this year, which I think will in turn make campus planning better….not because there’s more money than last year, but because there are more people involved in different and new ways that they haven’t been involved before).
Oh and regarding OCL and Neighborhoods…they’re separate. NGBs do not “report” to the OCL nor are they responsible to OCL. They are only “overseen” by OCL in the sense that every student group is overseen by some administrator on campus (most are also “overseen” by OCL–ie: OCL makes sure they follow college regulation). In some sense, OCL’s oversight affects the NGBs much more severely than other groups because NGBs plan so much more (more, which often involves touchy subjects like alcohol), but that’s it. The last time I checked, the President of the neighborhood was 100% in charge of the NGB (and not the CLC–who, while certainly a valuable member of the board–ultimately is not the President’s or the board’s boss). Maybe it doesn’t seem like that, but the NGBs are no less independent than College Council from OCL.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:25 am
The real problem (which is actually thanks to a virtue) is this: Williams is too small and tightly knit as a community on the whole to innately inspire such competition. If I have a friend in another cluster, I can see him every day and eat with him every day. Such rivalries do better when there’s some substantial basis for the rivalry- history, geography, what have you.
Such history could emerge, but it could well not, and other forces seem lacking.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:02 am
Has it been uttered recently? No? Then I’ll make the sacrifice of saying it - “bring back fraternities”. The fraternity system provided continuing, campus wide, vibrant but genteel, social competition both athletically and also in many other ways - all without the application of much in resources by the College administration.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Even if the scene improved last year (which I don’t think is the case, with the exception of maybe Gunther - any given weekend night’s event(s) were pretty much the same as before in quality and quantity)…it doesn’t make up for the reduction in choices for housing locations or living with friends. I’d rather be able to move across campus or change my pick group than have more expensive parties, and so would a lot of people who don’t just live for the weekends.
Don’t know why I’m still posting about it though - it’s a done deal, which barely affected me last year and doesn’t at all now. If it does work out better this year and next, I will be sincerely glad for current students.