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.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:42 pm
The reason the Ivy League schools consistently rank in the top universities in the world is the insistance on academic excellence. Once they start making exceptions for stronger backs and weaker minds the intellectual talent pool will become ” dumbed down.” Most college athletes are not going pro in their sport, however most college grads will be going “pro” in their degree arena. A high power diploma simply has more recruiter alure than a great college athletic career when it comes time to find a job. All that said, keeping the power in the diploma requires keeping academic standards at their highest.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:40 am
The issue is mostly with football and basketball. Most other sports have smarter kids in them. I know because I treat or advise many in my practice. My speciality is gymnastics, and most of these kids have done private schooling throughout high school. My own daughter is currently in college on a track scholarship, and now MIT is interested in recruiting her for her Junior year. They generally come from higher socioeconomic homes, and the parents have spent a lot of money on private coaching, select teams and travel. They recoup most of this money with their scholarships in the end. The football and basketball players do seem to struggle with academics, and I see many ways we could raise their IQ with simple nutritional supplements and most importantly, getting the American diet out of their face.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:03 am
James Denito you are a racist. “Most other sports have smarter kids in them”??? And since when does private schooling=smarter? Having taught in private schools myself, the children are mostly of average Intelligence whose parents have bought them shelter from the rest of the (mostly brown) world among other things such as expensive toys, teachers, and grades. I finally had to quit teaching in private schools because my conscience would not allow me to continue participating in a system in which every semester i was asked to change failing grades of at least 5 students whose parents were major donors to the school. Look to your ex-president GWB for dumb people who go to Ivy Leagues and then go take some nutritional supplements.