Milton’s Existential Club Crisis

BY JUBI OLADIPO ‘24

Picture this. You’re winding down after a long day of school, sports, and homework, ready to finally relax. You situate yourself most comfortably on your couch to take a nap. As moments pass, you find yourself falling into a deep slumber when you suddenly hear it: BZZZZ. You’ve received an email. You contemplate whether or not to check this email, but reluctantly unlock your phone anyways. You read the heading: NEW CLUB ALERT! You groan in agony, shut down your phone, and desperately try (and fail) to cling onto the moments of rest you’ve now just sacrificed for nothing.

For many of us, this experience is all too familiar and perhaps even triggering. It feels as though there’s a new club on this campus every single week. And while some new clubs provide exciting spaces for students to share their interests, the vast majority of these groups merely piggyback upon one another. The allure of these clubs is ever-fleeting, as is our ability to even attend them; the club block system has made it nearly impossible for the number of clubs we have to function. This influx of new student groups and scheduling issues has left us with an oversaturated market of unsubstantiated clubs.

Say, for instance, that you are interested in investing and economics. At Milton, there are many ways that one could get involved in this interest. In fact, the Investment Club meets every Thursday in Greeley. There is also Invest in Girls which meets on Thursdays or Microfinance Club on Tuesdays. But if none of these options are captivating enough, there is also the Centre Street Journal and Econ Club. These five clubs are not all the same, and I don’t seek to minimize or pigeonhole them all together; nevertheless, there is a clear overlap in these clubs that could perhaps be strengthened by conjoining them together. Another instance of this overlap is reflected in the number of writing organizations we have here at Milton: The Milton Paper (the most superior student newspaper, of course), The (less popular) Milton Measure, The Patriot, Magus Mabus, Piece of Mind, Azaad, The Tavern, the F Word, GAIA, FTS, etc. By now, the number of clubs for students interested in writing far outnumbers the number of students who are even interested in writing. Here too, there are multiple overlaps between the core ideas of these clubs. If Milton was to encourage students to join pre-existing clubs instead of starting their own ones, the club market would not be so saturated. We, as students, would not have to spread ourselves so thin or struggle to discern which clubs are best from us. The rate in which new clubs are appearing on campus would suggest that perhaps the purpose of these clubs is not to create new spaces at all.

Whether we admit it or not, Milton’s culture feeds into a desperate, sometimes unhealthy obsession with college. In the rat race that is college admissions, students need to do whatever they can to set themselves apart from thousands of other applicants. And yet, I don’t believe that Milton should actively tolerate this culture even if it actively perpetuates it. We need stricter guidelines on new clubs at this school; an idea and an application should not be enough. New clubs should require proof of interest, originality, and genuine passion from their heads.

The influx of new clubs we’ve experienced in the past year is not sustainable under the current club block system. In any given club block, roughly five to ten clubs meet at once, and if you’re interested in more than one of these, you have no choice but to sacrifice one for the other. Six club blocks simply cannot support 60+ clubs. Because of these scheduling conflicts, attendance has decreased across nearly all clubs. People cannot be in multiple places at once as our current system demands. Either scheduling changes need to be made or clubs need to be limited. 

Clubs and student organizations are what make Milton special. They’re what allows us to connect with one another across grades, friend groups, and hierarchies. These spaces are valuable and important, but not in excess. The current club system threatens these spaces, limiting our community’s ability to unite productively. We need to not feed into the “whatever-it-takes” mindset that college and private school in general promotes; it does us only more harm than good. Instead, Milton should promote the clubs it already has and expand these clubs so that they can encompass a wider variety of interests.