Update on Club Constitutions

By MAX LITVAK ‘20

Starting this year, all club heads are required to write a constitution where they will demonstrate their goals for the club, show what their meetings will look like, and describe what they want to accomplish. In addition to these general requirements, all clubs are required to host at least one event per year; for example, LatinX hosted a culture night a few weeks ago.

The school implemented the constitution requirement to help clubs lay out their goals for the year and comprehensively outline their programming, but does this regulation really help improve clubs? To attempt to answer this question, I emailed several of club heads who run clubs spanning from Programming Club to French club to Invest in Girls. Despite the variety in clubs, however, the heads all had similar things to say.

All of the club heads I emailed agreed that the idea of having a constitution for each club, while good in theory, has some problems. One of the biggest problem the club heads outlined was the timing of this assignment. Charlotte Moremen ‘19, one of the co-heads of computer programming club, said that “the writing of the constitution has come at a particularly inconvenient time for seniors, who are all trying to get their early apps in for college on November 1st or 15th.” Like most of the people I emailed, she didn’t have a problem with the requirement to write the constitutions, but instead with the timeframe heads were given to write them. She went on to say, “perhaps [the constitution] was an idea that was created over the summer and so it had to be executed in the fall, but in general, I think [it] would have been far less of a burden had [the constitutions] been done in the spring.”

I also asked if the act of writing the constitution helped club heads more clearly voice their goals were for the year. Most of the people I emailed agreed that writing a constitution would be beneficial to new clubs in this way; however, they also said that most recurring clubs had already figured out their goals for the year, and having to write a constitution was repetitive. For example, Tamara Cowham ‘19, one of the co-heads of French club, said, “writing the constitution kind of helped determine our goals, but Anna Mikhailova ‘19 and I had already discussed in depth what we wanted to accomplish with our faculty sponsor and have already started acting on [our goals]. Therefore, the constitution was...redundant and unnecessary.”

Although many responses to the constitutions seem negative, that may not represent the view of the entire student body. Although the respondents said the constitution did not specifically help their club, all agreed that having to write a constitution could help lay out the goals of a new club or help club heads who do not have plans for the year. Because of college applications, it may be better to require only new clubs to write a constitution, or to require established clubs to revisit their constitution in the spring instead of in the fall.

Editor’s Note: On October 18, Ms. Reiser emailed club heads to extend the deadline for the constitution to 10 am on Monday, October 22.