Ivy League Athletics – Aiming too Low?
May 29th, 2009 - byToday’s Wall Street Journal ran an interesting story about Ivy League athletics. As a Yale grad, when I tell people where I attended college their first reaction is always “great school” rather than “great sports”. For decades the Ivy League has maintained its reputation as the best in the world when it comes to, well, almost everything. The Ivy League is number one in every academic field, consistently offers the most aggressive financial aid packages, has world renowned fine arts programs, etc, etc. The Ivy League has built a reputation of dominance and superiority yet they are often regarded as second tier when it comes to athletics. How can such a competitive group of business folk and scholars be okay with not being number one on the playing field?
According to the Journal, the Ivy League accepts they will never be supreme in athletics because they refuse to sacrifice their academic ideals in order to build world class teams.
Why are the Ancient Eight increasingly irrelevant in the most competitive arena of all? The short answer, the long-accepted one, is that they choose to be: that they won’t sacrifice their academic ideals by giving athletic scholarships to athletes. But other factors-like a long-standing ban on postseason football games and the schools’ academic standards for athletes-appear to be dragging the league down.
The Ivy is never going to be the Southeastern Conference-and nobody is suggesting it should be. The schools don’t need the exposure of sports to attract students and alumni donations. But some of the league’s alumni complain that the schools offer their students the best of everything, except in this one area. “Why not give them the same opportunities and the same platform in athletics that you do in academics?” says Marcellus Wiley, a former NFL defensive end who played at Columbia in the 1990s. “I think they should revisit everything.”
I agree with Wiley, not former Harvard president Derek Bok who believes that the Ivies should let this one go. The second shift was the Ivy’s 1981 expulsion from Division I-A, college football’s premier classification, which occurred because larger-conference schools desired greater control over TV-contract negotiations. They voted to restrict I-A membership to schools that had 30,000-seat stadiums or averaged 17,000 in attendance over the previous four years, which not all of the Ivy League schools did. The Ivies didn’t contest the decision.
“It was clear that’s not where the Ivy should be,” says Derek Bok, Harvard’s president at the time who scoffs at the idea that the Ivies must excel in all endeavors, athletics included. “If we have a bit of humility, we have to understand that nobody can be excellent at everything. There’s no reason why, because you’re good at teaching and research, that you have to be good at football. That’s a historical accident, not a necessity.”
Come on. Sure, there must be some areas where the Ivy League can forfeit its superiority but sports should not be one of them. It would not be that hard for the Ivies to make a commitment to producing national contenders and I believe they could do without severely compromising their academic standards.
