On a campus filled with talented, impassioned students, College administrators struggle to make the curriculum as engaging as extracurricular life.

The College is and should be “clear with students that academic obligations come before extracurriculars,” Lewis wrote in a February memo to Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby.

“But statistics, and 25th reunion reports, don’t lie: at Harvard, we do a better job with nonacademic life than with academic life,” he adds.

Kirby says extracurriculars are valuable because students say they are.

“Our students are talented in multiple dimensions: in scholarship, in the arts, in athletics, in the leading of organizations. I believe that activities beyond the classroom are important because they are important to the students,” says Kirby, who is also the faculty adviser to the Chinese Yo-yo Club, wrote in an e-mail.

Though he says he is committed to extracurriculars and believes they have their place in undergraduate life, Kirby stresses that students come to Harvard because of its academic reputation and it is the College’s primary responsibility to provide a high-quality education.

“Extracurricular activities may enrich the life of this and other colleges, but college is a serious place for education. Students are drawn to Harvard with the primary expectation of receiving an education of very high caliber and, in time, an A.B. degree,” Kirby says. “I don’t believe that is an extracurricular activity.”

“How many would come, simply to play sports, write for a student newspaper, or sing and act, and not get a degree? At Harvard, that percentage is vanishingly small,” Kirby adds.

Kirby has made similar points in public as well. This fall, at a speech welcoming first-years to Harvard, Kirby emphasized that academic work is central to the Harvard educational experience.

“You are here to work, and your business here is to learn,” he said in his September address.

Others however, have articulated more complex philosophies to justify attention to extracurriculars in an educational context and to explain their unique draw.

In a 1999 memo to then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, Lewis provided three reasons why he believes extracurriculars are important to Harvard: they enhance education, provide a center for social life and keep students out of trouble.

“I am using broad language in calling these experiences ‘educational’ but it’s a fact that, even for many of our academic stars, the hours spent being theatre techies made dramatic literature part of their lives, and the time spent in the Veritones taught more about teamwork, and contract negotiations, than any course could have done,” Lewis wrote to Knowles. “We need to respond to [students’] developmental needs and the full range of their interests and talents, not just academic ones.”

Lewis observed in a February memorandum addressed to Kirby that “many internal observers of the Harvard scene” employ “hydraulic and mechanical metaphors” to explain how students’ energies should be focused on academics.

“People often say that the energy students put into extracurriculars should be ‘diverted’ or ‘channeled’ into academic activities, or that extracurriculars should be limited so as to provide better ‘balance’ with academic activities,” he wrote. “The image is that students’ attention, energy, or at least time is a finite resource, and that the way to focus more of it on academics, and thereby improve undergraduate education, is to limit the amount that can be spent extracurricularly; the excess will inevitably wind up in the academic sphere.”