Fun's Expediter

Zac Corker

Harvard News Office

Styled "Harvard’s Fun Czar" by Reuters and CNN, Zac Corker ’04 sits in his University Hall office and explains that his actual job title — "special assistant to the dean for social programming" — is far more sober. A popular undergraduate whose classmates elected him a class marshal in their senior year, Corker became a social lion, though, by helping launch www.hahvahdparties.com, an on-line guide to weekend revelry in the Houses. As a senior, he helped with social planning on the Mather House Council and Senior Class Committee; when some College events ran up against city rules, he noticed that there wasn’t much support available from the College.

"I wrote a letter suggesting creating a position to assist students with campus-wide social events," Corker says, "and I volunteered to fill it." He started work in the fall: setting up the mega-tailgate party before The Game and a successful interhouse dodgeball tournament in December (there was even a decanal entry). Corker will join the Peace Corps this fall, but the job he invented will continue as a presidential fellowship, filled annually by a new Harvard graduate. "Doing this depends on having a connection with the students," he explains. "I could do it one more year, but after that I wouldn’t know any of the kids. Pretty soon, I’d be 26 and thinking like an administrator."