Regulations Miss Targets

Edward W. Cuffe '61 says he is "mad" at Harvard and the Ivy League. The varsity basketball team's leading scorer as a junior a year ago, he is now ineligible for competition under an Ivy League rule originally designed to prevent "pirating" of athletes.

Cuffe was not "pirated." He was a second-string player as a sophomore at Holy Cross, and was not approached by any Harvard official before he applied for a transfer. New he is an Honors candidate in English and a Dean's List student, but his basketball career was terminated after one year plus parts of two games.

Two rules, one an Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference regulation and one peculiar to the Ivy League, trapped Cuffe. A sophomore again in 1953-59, Cuffe sat out a year in observation of an ECAC rule requiring athletes to be in residence at a college for 12 months before participating in varsity competition.

Then he ran into the Ivy League stipulation that a year in college counts against eligibility, whether the student competes or not. The ECAC and, by a recent decision, the NCAA give an athlete five years from the date of matriculation to complete four years of eligibility, but the Ivy League allows only four.

"The idea of the transfer rule is to prevent pirating of athletes by rival colleges," Donald M. Felt, assistant Director of Athletics, said yesterday. "The penalty involved is loss of a year. A student shouldn't be allowed to jump around at will."

"If a boy's basic reason is academic," Felt continued, "the restriction won't make much difference." He pointed out that before the transfer rule was passed, athletes across the country could switch to colleges that made "better offers."

But Felt admitted that "pirating" is "not too apt to happen in the Ivy League," and that "there are very few transfers within the Ivy League." Conceding that "the transfer rule is occasionally hard," Felt noted that exceptions may be made by the Ivy Committee on Eligibility to boys with "a straightforward approach" to the problem.

No one has yet explained why approaches like Cuffe's are not "straightforward." The rule as it stands seems to discourage scholar-athletes from transferring into an Ivy League school.

The regulation, while unkind to students who take the "straightforward" approach, is open to dishonest practices. Among cases of evasion widely discussed around the Ivy League are:

A Yale player who flunked out but got his year of eligibility back when a doctor declared him psychologically unfit for college--an exemption becouse of "illness";

A Princeton star who dropped out of school but claimed a spurious "injury"; and

A Crimson performer who played his last year of varsity basketball after his original class had graduated, but simply kept his mouth shut