Athletic Recruiting

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Every one of us is a representative of Harvard from the day we accept admission. People who don't care how the representatives of their school perform in competition or otherwise overlook the fact that these people--athletes, musicians, debaters, alumni--provide an image, positive or negative, that is projected upon them as Harvard women and men. Of course, it would be unduly embarrassing for Harvard to be an athletic powerhouse if athletes were seen as ignoramuses.

Now if we ask why alumni seem to display somewhat more enthusiam for recruiting athletes than they do for recruiting introverted geeks (who after all appear to be the only identifiable group to vociferate sullenly towards the mental capacity or treatment of Harvard athletes when they are given a podium), we might conclude that alumni have more admiration for--and take greater pride in Harvard's athletes than they do in Harvard's introverted "strictly academic students."

Furthermore, we might inquire as to why the hundreds of resentful "strictly academic students" who apparently graduate from Harvard every year have not put forth a similar effort into recruiting their own kind. Introverts don't recruit anybody because introverts don't care about other introverts whereas extroverts seek out other extroverts and generally tolerate introverts. Harvard puts up with a few hundred "pure academic students" every year to ensure that those who lock themselves up in their little libraries or laboratories and eventually do make a contribution to mankind through a lifetime of uninterrupted self-application can make all of us at Harvard look good, just as a Harvard championship team makes even senior Jay D. Katzman of Lowell House look good. Baltasar D. Cruz '87