Competing Priorities in University Organizing

In university group organizing, there is often a substantial gap between the potential of a campus EA group and how successful such a group manages to be in practice, given that it exists at all. Organizers are the primary driver of group success, and I think that difficulties with recruiting and retaining skilled organizers are the source of much of this gap. Often, potential organizers have a variety of other opportunities available to them, and organizing must clearly “win out” as the more appealing option in order for someone to consistently commit to organizing a group.

Organizing faces difficulties winning out compared to the other opportunities available to students, since it involves much more uncertainty and self-direction. While this is difficult to entirely ameliorate, I believe that much can be done to close the gap between organizing work and its competition.^[1] The following is a list of strategies I believe could be useful in doing so.

1. Recruit younger organizers^[2]

Upperclassmen are more appealing as potential organizers and are almost certainly better at it than their younger peers. Unfortunately, the most appealing candidates have often already committed themselves to other activities which they are unwilling to give up, even for potentially greater impact. Organizers who start during their freshman or sophomore year will probably also have longer careers, allowing for more knowledge accumulation and fewer instances of succession. Running a successful club early in your college career can also be seen as high status.

2. Study and communicate the art of organizing 

The work that existing OSP mentors, organizer networks, and public posts do to help organizers learn is already very valuable. Still, I think there would be worthwhile benefits to a much more expansive informational ecosystem. To give a particular example, there is often only a limited window of time in the start of a semester where successful recruitment is possible. Given the tiny number of reps organizers will get in this crucial activity, a better-developed organizing community would provide more anecdotal data that organizers could use to construct a better world model to guide their actions, along with more opportunities for useful connection with organizers in similar situations.

3. Show why organizing is impactful

The career decisions young EAs make will often be grounded in some sort of cost benefit analysis, and I feel that CEA could provide better data on the outcomes and impact they observe downstream of organizing. Perhaps this data actually suggests organizing is not particularly valuable, but public understanding of this would still lead to better outcomes.^[3]

Relatedly, it might be valuable to give organizers some credit for the successes of their club members, even when this is individually inaccurate. As it stands, if your group graduates Neel Nanda, you don’t get any status for this, which seems suboptimal. It may even be valuable for organizers to consider themselves as being in competition with each other. Presently, organizers have little sense of what many of their peers have accomplished, and while a sense of competition is fraught with downsides, I believe it could be net positive.

Thank you to Noah Birnbaum for encouraging me to write this and helping to revise it. Thank you to Kennan McClung for providing feedback.

Parts of this post rhyme with some of Matt Reardon’s writing.

1. ^{^}

   I also expect that this competition framing could be particularly appropriate when considering more high achieving schools, where students have access to a wider range of appealing opportunities from an earlier age.

2. ^{^}

   This is already somewhat common, whether by choice or circumstance, but I believe it should be even more common. 

3. ^{^}

   Here is an example of making the argument, but in a better world we might have a lot more data to use in doing so.