Pointing the 'Big Finger'

CONGRATULATIONS, men's hockey team. You did real well.

Perhaps too well.

It is troubling, almost embarrassing, that Harvard fields a top-flight team in a professional sport. This is heresy, I know. But hear me out. I have my reasons, three of them.

Before I lay them out, I want to make it clear that I harbor no ill will toward any particular Harvard athlete. These folks are to be congratulated for doing what they do well as well as they can. It is not the athletes but the general cirsumtances of Harvard athletics that I find objectionable.

The Serious Student Objection. We undergrads go wild over the sports we decide are important. Men's squash wins the national championship routinely and no one seems to care, but when football or hockey gets good in its respective league, watch out.

Two weekends ago, the talk among Harvardians returning from spring break was almost exclusively of Providence. Didja hear we lost in the finals? Didja hear Fusco was out? Didja care?

More concretely, that Monday The Crimson chose to devote three full pages to the hockey team. That's more coverage than any news story has received in the past four years. And there was no hue and cry.

Why not? Because it is taken for granted that students are primarily interested in sports, that this is a major, perhaps the major concern of undergraduates.

Moreover, this bizarre devotion is taken for normal. Students should be slavish followers of sports teams. A Harvard undergraduate who doesn't give a damn whether the hockey team wins or loses is thought odd, standoffish. Sadly, the men who run Harvard feel the same way.

And they use this judgment to dismiss those students with serious non-sports interests. Do you care about academics? Those who support a women's studies concentration, like those who supported an Afro-American Studies department two decades ago, are thought to be out of their element. Do you care about investment policy? Again, such students are often ignored with smug complacency.

Harvard is not the only place where sports have often been used to dismiss the serious concerns of college students. At Berkeley, in 1964, when a large number of students protested what they felt were arbitrary and unfair administrative decisions, a football pep rally threatened to become political counter-demonstration.

At Harvard today, the opposition between sports and serious student concerns is more subtle, but nonetheless real. The houses with the highest percentage of athletes tend to vote most conservatively--against the campus norm--in political opinion polls. Varsity athletes are occasionally used as bodyguards by the University administration and more recently were recruited as bouncers for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals' ceremony honoring Sylvester Stallone, where they manhandled one poor slob who dared to protest the choice of honoree.

More generally, the mania students exhibit when the football team beats Yale, when the hockey team beats Cornell, when the crew team beats whoever is this year's runner-up, are outpourings of emotion which create an image of the frivolous Harvard undergraduate, an image which is sure to seep over and stain the administration's reactions to non-frivolous undergraduate projects.

It's a shame we can't have our fun and be taken seriously too, but given the either-or choice let's tone down the fun. It was a tough decision, I'll admit.

THE CELEBRITY Objection. Most people have a celebrity ratio of about one-to-one. That is, they are recognized by approximately as many people as they recognize. Some people have very high C-ratios: these famous folks are recognized by many more people than they recognize.

Big-name professors fall in this category: you've seen their picture, you know their name, maybe you sat in on a lecture, but they don't know you from a hole in the ground. I think it is sad that almost all of the Harvard students who have high C-ratios are athletes.

Everyone knows who Scott Fusco is, and what he looks like. A picture in The Crimson on March 31 didn't even bother to identify him, he's so familiar. During the football season, virtually everyone recognizes the quarterback. Sometimes a basketball star attains the same status.

And who else? Brian Offutt, the Undergraduate Council chair? Sure, but half the student media attention to him is negative--the type of articles that would never appear on sports pages.

Why is it that we choose to glorify those students who are good athletes, more than those who are good students, or good musicians, or good actors, or good writers? These others gain personal notoriety only occasionally, while sports stars are continually buttered up, written about, and fussed over.

It seems silly that we should choose our celebrities on the basis of muscular ability. Moreover, such a choice seems inconsistent with the educational and academic premises on which the University is based, since no one tries to argue that Harvard athletes are the biggest brains on campus.

THE "STUDENT-ATHLETE" myth objection. It is a shallow stereotype that jocks are large, stupid, beer-swilling, anti-intellectual goons recruited and virtually paid to bring glory and attention and money to Harvard by their athletic prowess. There is, of course, an alternative stereotype, which portrays Harvard team members as upstanding scholar-athletes, forsaking countless hours of free time to bring glory to their alma mater.

The truth is somewhere in between, with notable cases fulfilling and perpetuating both myths.

But the official version draws solely on the positive stereotype. A two-minute promo presumably filmed by the Athletic Department and aired during a televised Harvard football game showed the team captain, books under his arm, speaking as eruditely as possible on the moral advantages of a fine education and a non-scholarship team.

That advertisement was certainly not an appropriate moment to discuss some of the seamier aspects of the Harvard athletic industry. But then, no moment seems to be appropriate for such a discussion.

Outsiders seem to buy the scholar-athlete myth. A March 31 story in The New York Times on the NCAA men's ice hockey final used an extended David vs. Goliath metaphor to praise Harvard's noble effort.

Missing in all this repetition of the positive stereotype is any mention of contradictory information. I have yet to read about Harvard's recruiting and admissions practices for potential big-sport athletes. Is the rumor correct that these people get special treatment in Byerly Hall?

The traditional response to such allegations is that Harvard gives "special consideration" to applicants who are talented in any number of ways: piccolo players, journalists, and actors get the same treatment as linemen and forwards. But is the rumor true that athletes get even more special treatment than the others--that Harvard does not have to sacrifice as much academic ability when it admits piccolo players as when it admits athletes?

There is a story, undocumented, supporting this position: it has to do with a bunch of football players sitting around comparing SAT scores. This is normal freshman year behavior, but there was a twist. Apparently the athletes were bragging about who had the lowest SAT scores, because the lower scores meant Harvard must have credited them with greater athletic ability.

Such anti-intellectual attitudes, if true, would seem to be in direct contradiction with Harvard ideals and standards.

And it is not just the players, or some of them, who fail to fulfill the positive scholar-athlete stereotype. The Department of Athletics also may play fast and loose on occasion. Percs--such as better meals, no work "jock jobs," and tutoring--are rumored to help make athletes' college lives more pleasant.

This pampering of athletes is silly at a University whose stated aim is education. If athletics is bringing in big bucks which can be used for educational purposes, then Harvard should at least be honest about it.

BUT I AM not advocating the abolition of sports. Sound mind, sound body is not an outdated concept. However, this goal is best achieved through the allocation of funds to sports-for-the-masses, to intramurals.

The big-money sports simply do not deserve the numerous trainers, expensive equipment, lax admission standards, and other perquisites which they currently enjoy. To be sure, Harvard can and does pride itself on a sports operation considerably cleaner than most universities. But this is having one's cake and eating it too: Harvard tries to claim saintliness and to sin a little at the same time.

The problem with extreme success--like the men's hockey team's recent exploits--is that the claims of saintliness and the potential for sin both rise exponentially. Just as Harvard attracts national publicity--all echoing the positive myth--the University faces increased pressures for aggressive recruiting and other sleazy practices, in order to maintain the high athletic standard it has set for itself.

In other words, sporting success is not merely the result of such practices, but also the cause.

And that, at root, is the most troubling aspect of a Harvard team so good that it loses the national championship by a single goal. The Department of Athletics has given itself a hard act to follow. One can only wait and see what lengths it will go to in the pursuit of national championships, an ideal which is ultimately meaningless at an academic institution like Harvard.