Harvard Community Outreach and Public Service (Har’d Corps) didn’t exist before Stephen N. Smith ’02 came to Harvard.

Neither did Boston Area Students Involved in the Community, the Harvard AIDS Coalition, the Community Careers Initiative or the Diversity Movement—all groups Smith founded or helped to found.

During his four years on campus, Smith helped keep these groups afloat, leading countless meetings and advertising events with his trademark ASCII art e-mails.

He was one of about 25 students who occupied Mass. Hall for three weeks to protest for higher wages for Harvard employees. In the fall of 2000, he ran for Undergraduate Council president.

“I really love meetings. I want to be an organizer when I grow up, so this was my best education and where I wanted to put the most time,” Smith writes in an e-mail.

But Smith graduated last spring and he’s now in Botswana doing AIDS advocacy work, far away from Cambridge and his student groups.

While the groups grew under Smith’s attention, now the question is whether they will live beyond his graduation or disappear like countless other student groups before them.

And although Smith may be the most visible example, he’s not alone in his desire to organize students into new groups.

At a school that attracts students with reputations for leading extracurriculars, students and administrators say they are concerned about the ever-expanding number of groups on campus—but they’re reluctant to take action.

To Be or Not To Be

Starting a new group is a strikingly simple process.

Students must create a constitution, a list of officers and recruit 10 members and two faculty advisers, according to The Handbook for Students.

They submit all this information to the Committee on College Life (CCL), a group of students, faculty and administrators that meets two or three times per year to approve new student groups.

The process is so lax that Associate Dean of the College and Co-chair of CCL David P. Illingworth ’71 said last spring he could not remember the last time CCL rejected a student group.

CCL approved 28 new groups last semester, bringing the total number of student groups to 250 for about 6,600 undergraduates, making Harvard’s student group-to-student ratio significantly higher than those of other schools in the area.