Student groups are proliferating on campuses from Harvard to Chapel Hill, The Boston Globe reports. At Harvard the number of groups has grown from 240 to almost 400 in a decade. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the tally is 508, double the total 10 years ago.

Not surprisingly, there’s plenty of overlap among the groups. Harvard, for example, boasts a LGBT Political Coalition as well as a Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance, which the first group felt had an insufficient focus on politics. The university also is home to an Undergraduate Global Health Forum and a Global Health and Aids Coalition. Singing groups replicate like Topsy.

College officials are concerned about the boom. They say the groups compete for the same pool of student-activity money and campus office space. Some of the new groups, they say, represent the splintering of existing organizations on racial or ethnic lines.

But in the final analysis, the trend may owe more to students’ careerist impulses than anything else. “Member of” will never look as good as “President of” on a résumé. And at some institutions, high-flying students, like the Emerald City’s army of generals, can’t imagine themselves as anything but leaders.

Groucho Marx once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” How, one wonders, would he have fared today as a student if he upheld that policy? —Andrew Mytelka