Playing Foul

Editor's Note: This is the first of a two-part staff editorial on the athletic department. The second part will run tomorrow in this space.

T he life of student-athletes at Harvard can be pretty dismal. Early mornings, long practices, physical exhaustion, almost total campus indifference. There are few Christian Laettners here.

And Harvard's Department of Athletics is usually as clean as a church bingo game. No pay-for-play scandals, no recruitment packages worthy of pro teams--in short, no blatant ethical violations. And, consequently, no nosepoking NCAA investigators rummaging around 60 JFK St. for examples of wrongdoing.

But the athletics department at Harvard, like that of many other universities, isn't perfect. In fact, there may be enough unaccounted-for cash flowing through the department's doors to capitalize a small, unregulated European bank. And there are enough athlete perquisites--in admissions, special trips and cushy jobs--to raise concerns about a lack of equal treatment by the administration.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the athletics department is its near-complete lack of financial accountability to students and even to the faculty committee appointed to "oversee" it.

No one except a few athletics department big-wigs knows how much the department spends each year. You can't find out. We can't find out. The members of the oversight committee can't find out. Why not?

Tradition. "It's a longstanding policy," Director of Athletics William J. Cleary '56 says lamely.

To be fair, no other department releases its budget figures, either. And this is the crux of a larger issue: The administration expects students and other members of the community to accept budget cuts during times of financial peril, like now. From the History Department to the Russian Research Center to intramural sports, everyone's got to hurt a little. Fine.

But, setting aside the fact that most of us--students or otherwise--have absolutely no formal role in deciding what gets cut, we don't even know how money is currently spent. This means we can't even informally advise administrators on what's receiving short shrift and what's getting too much cash.

And anyway, the case of the Department of Athletics is different. No, we can't find out the budget figures for the Government Department, but Gov professors and students aren't complaining about discrepancies in treatment by department officials. With coaches and athletes, however, complaints run thick and angry.

As we reported earlier this week, some teams get special perks that others don't. The men's hockey team visited the White House after its NCAA victory. The women's lacrosse team was originally told Harvard had no money for such a trip after its NCAA victory a year later, although the team was able to get funding eventually to make the trip.

Baseball players travel through the South each year to play opponents there; softball players have to pay for their own uniforms.

And the heavyweight crew team gets an expenses-paid jaunt to a training complex in Gail's Ferry, Conn. every year before the Yale race, while the lightweights stay in Cambridge to train.

This particular boondoggle costs Harvard $30,000 each year--for just two weeks of training. The complex, called Red Top, stays empty for the rest of the year, according to Senior Associate Director of Athletics Francis J. Toland.

At the very least, the facility should be open to use by other students and University affiliates--much like the Harvard Outing Club's cabins in New Hampshire, which are open to anyone from Harvard when the Outing Club and the First-Year Outdoor Program are not using them.