Deming Says Comping for Student Groups Is ‘Zero Sum’ but Won’t Intervene

College Dean David J. Deming said at a Wednesday open forum that Harvard’s “comping” culture made joining student clubs feel like a zero-sum competition, but claimed administrators were poorly positioned to change it.

Deming said he regretted that comping — the process by which student groups select new members, often through competitive applications or a semester of assigned work — left students measuring themselves against one another, much as they had during college admissions.

“It makes it seem like the admissions process all over again. It makes it very zero sum. ‘So-and-so got in, I didn’t,’” Deming said.

But he said the process bore little resemblance to life at Harvard.

“It’s just not real,” he said. “You could choose to compete in those games, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But you have to understand that’s not real life. Life doesn’t work that way.”

Instead, Deming argued, a successful career does not require outcompeting one’s peers, pointing to his own experience as a graduate student in economics alongside classmates with stronger backgrounds in math or statistics.

“There were people who were just way better at the problem sets than I was — like way better. And I felt like I was never going to compete with them,” he said. “And I learned I didn’t actually have to. They can write good papers, and I can write good, different papers. The fact that they’re really good at it doesn’t make me worse at it.”

Deming said he had heard concerns about comping from many students, several of whom asked him to step in. But he said barring the practice would mean intruding on students’ lives to a degree he compared to a “totalitarian regime.”

“I look at our role as more to help you understand that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get something you want, help you understand you don’t need to, rather than tell you not to,” he said.

Administrative intervention would not shift student behavior in any case, he added.

“I actually think the most effective route to behavior change is student to student. I think you guys are looking at each other for what things matter and who — more than you’re looking at us. So if I say, ‘You should do this and you shouldn’t do this,’ you’re like, ‘Yeah, sounds good. You’re old,’” he said.

“But if the peers you admire are doing certain things and they’re the people who you look up to, and that role model changes, that’s a way more effective way to change a culture or to lead,” he added.

Deming took a similar position on recruiting timelines at an April open forum, where he said compressed hiring cycles in finance, technology, and consulting were narrowing students’ career exploration — but that barring firms from campus would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Still, Deming acknowledged Wednesday that the College shapes students’ values whether or not it says so.

“What we’re doing here at Harvard isn’t just preparing you for great jobs. I think we are developing character and virtues, whether we like it or not,” he said. “You are learning from your experience here the kind of person you want to be. And I think that we can never talk about it, but even not talking about it is saying something. So I think we can’t really avoid that idea.”

He said he had to weigh that against the fact that undergraduates are adults — and that as their dean, rather than their “dad” or “guardian,” telling them how to live was not part of his role. He described himself as “trapped” between the two principles.

“I want to have some humility about what I think you should do because it’s your life,” Deming said. “But also I’m aware of the fact that the way we talk about what we do and who we valorize and what we spend money on, those things have moral content.”

Deming said his own measure of the College was ultimately the character of its graduates.

“It matters to me that Harvard College graduates good people who contribute to the world, not just successful people by traditional means,” he said. “That matters to me a lot.”

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ser.85. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.