Clubs At Exeter Are Broken

By  SHAY KASHIF ‘26

Disclaimer: the following descriptions of specific clubs and their leadership are a reflection of the author’s personal experiences.

I’ve always prided myself on being someone who likes to get involved. If you know me, then you’ll know I like to inundate myself with as many challenges as possible. So it’s no surprise that when I came to Exeter, I wanted to get as involved as possible.

Exeter prides itself on its highly democratic culture, putting power into the hands of its students not only through Harkness, but through a co-curricular club system designed with minimal faculty involvement and guidance. While the intention of student leadership would be to make clubs more equitable, the total lack of faculty involvement has done the opposite — many clubs have unfortunately become quasi-elitist institutions that deny participation to all but a few students.

In my experience, the tryout and turnover systems that clubs use lead not to fairness but to the selection of the same few people every time. In my first fall term at Exeter, I ran myself through the gauntlet of academic clubs, conforming to the system. From debate to mock trial to Model UN, I packed my weeks with club meetings and signed up to try out for as many clubs as possible. The end result was always the same: I’d receive an email a week later that was prefaced with a verbose assurance that competition was unusually tough this year, and that unfortunately, the club leadership was forced to make the “very difficult decision” of choosing certain other people—usually those who had competed the previous year. Despite having been a ranked competitor in debate and Model UN previously in the California Bay Area, I didn’t really question it at first.

Being a programmer, I also initially attended the Web Board meetings for The Exonian. At one of these meetings, I suggested that we develop an automated system to upload articles to the website, pointing out that the current system of manual entry was slow and tedious. No one really took me seriously, and one of the digital editors told me that if I just wanted to complain, I should just leave. I took his advice — I felt that no one took my ideas seriously, and I realized that I’d rather not attend meetings in which my ideas weren’t being listened to. I haven’t gone to a Web Board meeting since. Looking back, while there may have been some legitimate reason for the objections, the environment felt unwelcoming to new ideas. Dejected, I told myself that maybe I just wasn’t good enough for the clubs at Exeter, and their criteria were far beyond me. 

In the months since, however, my opinion has changed. As many of these clubs wrap up their turnover applications, in which outgoing seniors hand over leadership to those in my grade, the process feels inequitable. When you overhear an applicant in an ostensibly fair process bragging to their friends about what they’re going to do when the previous co-heads “give them leadership” as though the outcome is already decided, you’re left wondering as to how fair the system can truly ever be. At the very least, if you already know who you’re giving a position to, then don’t waste everyone else’s time with wordy applications that belong on the Common Application and not a high school club’s criteria for participation.

The primary justification for the convoluted selection process of these clubs is that they choose the most qualified candidates to lead. By itself, it’s a valid point. Those who have won the most tournaments, awards, and accolades would be the natural choices for leaders. Yet the leaders of these clubs conveniently leave out the fact that they carefully control and restrict access to the aforementioned qualifications. Take, for example, the Daniel Webster Debate Society — out of the over sixty people that attend the club’s all-member Tuesday meetings, those who attend most tournaments are only a select few “varsity” or “advanced” team members who meet multiple times a week and actively build debating and argumentative skills. Regrettably, the very existence of advanced teams is a result of Exeter highly limiting the number of tournaments that students can attend — this restriction forces club leaders to choose a select few Exonians to attend competitions. The rest simply participate in redundant speaking drills on Tuesdays that, though fun, teach comparably little of value when it comes to debate itself. The consequences of this are that the process of becoming a “qualified candidate” is practically circular. The process to participate on a basic level is unfair, and as a result, so is the process for applying for leadership. The vast majority of people are repeatedly denied the opportunity to improve or even demonstrate their passion, skill, and ability. While I completely understand that there are simply more people in attendance than there are available spots for competitors, gatekeeping the ability to compete to a select few people is simply not the solution. 

It actively harms inclusivity, equity, and diversity and pushes away students who are genuinely passionate about a club. As debate turnovers commenced this year, a big talking point was sending more people to tournaments. Younger students, who have been unable to get any actual tournament experience as of yet, all cheered. It made me wonder: How much have we lost our way, treating the basic tenet of participation as though it was a bold, grand promise? This problem is endemic to every single competitive academic club and also isn’t helped by the fact that, administration-wise, clubs can only participate in a very limited number of tournaments. Again, while I understand that resources and spots are limited, this actively harms the express purpose of making clubs inclusive spaces to explore one’s interests.

The issue has permeated student life at the Academy so deeply that it’s essentially become an unspoken rule. It’s a running joke that despite signing up for dozens of clubs at the club fair, students will ultimately only end up attending three or four that they believe they can get co-head for. The club system has, therefore, created a system of complacency and elitism that has defeated its own purpose of creating equitable, inclusive spaces for students to explore their interests. Instead of participating in clubs because they’re something that they truly enjoy, Exonians have come to treat them as pathways to just another achievement on their college resume. When I expressed these frustrations to a friend, he told me that that’s “just the way it was” and discouraged me from writing this piece, telling me I would only come off as an over-competitive, apprehensive new student. 

But isn’t that what Exeter wants me to do? Exercise my voice? Get involved? How am I supposed to do that when the entire system, by design, prevents me from doing so? How am I supposed to do that when the very ability to participate is denied to me? Moreover, how am I supposed to demonstrate my ability to lead when positions are handed out on the basis of seniority and friendship, essentially through nepotism? If being a new student means that I don’t even have the right to participate in the supposedly inclusive clubs at Exeter, and I’m actively denied that right, then where am I supposed to go? Truthfully, I have no other avenue besides writing to use my voice.

Let me be absolutely clear — I am close friends with many of my peers who will lead these clubs next year, and they are, by all accounts, good people. I’ve expressed my frustrations to them, and in many cases, they agree with me. My purpose in writing this is by no means to denounce any specific individual. It’s to point out that fixing the issue with Exeter’s clubs will require more than just a few good people — it’ll take a far more radical approach to break the cycle of inequity, unfairness, and elitism that has consumed our student-led clubs. 

So this is a call to action addressed not just to students but the entire Exeter community. Ultimately, it is our duty to fix the club system. Together, as a community, we need to confront the issues our co-curriculars have rather than simply resign ourselves to them. The solution is by no means simple and would require a careful balance between faculty oversight and student autonomy, but it’s certainly doable. It would certainly require a combination of compromises to extend the competitive reach of these clubs, but more importantly, it would require a change within the attitude of students. The single biggest step we can take to make clubs more equitable at Exeter is the fostering of a more inclusive, accepting, and change-oriented mindset within student spaces.