School Spirit Not Dead Yet

"There's no school spirit at Harvard." The above statement is heard all over our campus, uttered and taken as gospel. No student can escape these words.

But on the occasion of the 111th edition of The Game, I ask for all of you cynics to reconsider. For those going to The Game today, the sold-out crowd at Soldiers Field (or, at least, the sold-out Harvard tickets) should make you think twice about an alleged lack of school spirit. And those of you who complain about it had better be at The Game.

Any time more than half of the student body of a school is expected at an event,--more than that are expected to see the Crimson beat Yale today--something is unifying the students. Could Harvard have more esprit? Sure, but couldn't any school? The first thing that all of you who declare our school's spirit dead should consider is what exactly school spirit means.

I know this sounds stupid, but it really is important. After all, before you can call an animal extinct you have to know what it looks like. The thing people most often lament and use as an indicator of the decline in school spirit is the falling attendance at football games. You know what? They're right, attendance has fallen--but that's about all that they're right about. In the '50s, school spirit probably could be measured by how many of the cigar-smoking, coat-and-tie wearing, all-male Harvard preppies went to football games.

But this isn't your father's university. It's the new generation of Harvard. Our football teams today are not exactly the equal of the Rose-Bowl-winning squad of 75 years ago. Once a power in college football, the Ivy League has been losing ground ever since its heyday in the late 1800s. The rise in bigtime college athletics elsewhere accelerated Harvard's decline, which today's Division I-AA status attests to.

Top academic institutions and athletic powerhouses are more and more frequently becoming mutually exclusive. People who point to schools like Ohio State and Alabama as examples of school spirit need look no further than their U.S. News and World Report rankings to understand the difference.

Those who have managed to combine the two, most notably Stanford and Duke, have only done so through the use of athletic scholarships. And while both schools have vocal fans, both also have large segments of the student body who really couldn't care less.

With regard to athletic ineptitude, Harvard is not alone, but together with the rest of the Ivies. The Yale Bowl, which once filled to watch the likes of its 1969 team of Brian Dowling of Doonesbury fame and Calvin Hill, the future Dallas Cowboy All-Pro, never fills for football games.

But what about Princeton? The Tigers to our south are often pointed to as an example of a spirited school which also boasts high academic caliber. But Princeton is undergoing the same type of football attendance crisis as Harvard. As a matter of fact, Princeton has been discussing building a new stadium because the old one is too big for the crowds of today. At least Soldiers Field is safe.

Speaking of Princeton, they're the Tigers. Yale are the Bulldogs. And we are...The Undergraduate Council has unveiled the Angry Pilgrim as a potential mascot. While some question definitely remains as to how successful it will be, any mascot would be an improvement over nothing.

Returning to Ivy football, it makes sense that with the teams nowhere near the Top 25, less people are going to go to see them. This trend has been exacerbated recently by the quality of Harvard football even within the Ancient Eight. Harvard's winning seasons over the past decade have been few and far between.

In that respect, attendance is likely to improve in the next few years with the presence of Coach Tim Murphy. He has taken the Crimson's offense out of the Ice Age and plays a very modern brand of football. Already the team is better conditioned and coordinated than in the recent past. Their future actually looks quite promising. All Murphy needs is a few years to improve the team. When he does, fans will be sure to follow.

Supporting the idea that spirit is tied to competitiveness is Harvard's hockey team, the University's only championship team in a big-time sport. Every game played at Bright draws a large and raucous crowd. Those who desire a seat in the student section behind the far goal had better get their ticket early.

The crowd's chants, as anyone who has ever been to a game (or been an opposing goalie) knows, are loud and frequent. And unlike football, the games matter for national rankings. The Crimson is actually a perennial NCAA contender. In fact, one need look no further than the Bruins to see such former Harvard stars as Ted Donato.

But even hockey does not hold the interest of the entire student body. So what else is the lack of athletic enthusiasm attributed to? As the decades have gone by, Harvard has gotten more and more diverse and is much the better for it. Not only are there more minority students, but the students of today represent more geographical areas, are from more different kinds of backgrounds and have a larger variety of interests than ever before. The Harvard persona of the '50s just doesn't fit.

What this means is that the interests of the students on campus are much more diverse. Fewer people are sports fans, but that is to be expected. Just because Harvard students are less interested in athletics doesn't mean they lack spirit. That may be true of many schools in the country, but when a school has 25,000 students there will obviously be a greater number of diehards painting their school's name on their faces.

So, how do you judge spirit? Well, that's pretty tough to say, but one good way would seem to be how people feel about their school after they leave. And what better way to see this than how many of them choose to return something back to Harvard, most notably in the monetary sense.

Harvard is second in the country in terms of the rate of alumni choosing to donate to their schools. For large research universities that traditionally have lower rates of giving, such a rank is exceedingly impressive. What else is school spirit really about? Harvard students may not show their devotion the same way as at other schools, but why should we?

Sure, students criticize the University about tons of issues, often from opposite sides of the same issue. But would we want anything different? This is a place with a lot of highly opinionated, highly motivated, highly intelligent people. To expect the students to be uncritical would be wishing an atmosphere upon the university that it could never even desire. What better way for such students to show spirit than to criticize things they think would make a place they care about better?

And finally back to today's Game. After Harvard wins, how many students on campus won't feel even just a momentary rush of elation, or feel tempted to call a Yalie friend and rub it in? But what makes it so impressive is that it's not just true of the present students. Virtually every Harvard grad in the country will be feeling the same way and wanting to make the same phone call. Now that's spirit.