We Don't Need Physical Education

Evan Cucci's dire prediction of Harvard students "eating themselves in to an early grave" is only one of the outrageous assumptions about college students and food made in the course of his editorial ("Developing the Student Body," Feb. 9, 1994).The call for a university-wide fitness program and available nutritional information may indeed be a worth-while endeavor, but by setting such lofty standards for the bodies of the Harvard student body, Cucci only serves to perpetuate the anxieties of our weight-obsessed culture.

The majority of men and women on this campus maintain body weights that in no way pose any real threat to their health. However, Cucci describes the horrors of fat and weight gain in a manner more suitable for a Puritan diatribe against sin than a rational plan for greater fitness. He presents overeating as a "temptation" that the strong can resist but through which the weak snack their way to their eventual "self-destruction." Those who eat therefore lack discipline and control and need to be saved from their own cravings.

Harvard students do not need to be taught to "control their bodily desires" as Cucci states, nor should the pursuit of bodily improvement be a mandatory facet of college life. This university prides itself on its diversity; enforcing some sort of "healthy" standard for body shapes and size is a ridiculous idea and would directly contradict that educational mission.

Most disturbing is the author's assertion that many students justifiably "want to lose weight and improve their bodies, but simply do not know how." Even if this were true, simply sending students to the gym and nutrition class will not solve the problem. Perhaps Mr. Cucci is unaware of just how many college students, mostly women, spend time worrying about their weight. According to a recent study, as many as 30 percent of women in college and graduate school show symptoms of an eating disorder like anorexia nervosa or bulimia. Many of these women would fall into the category of those whom the author feels could use "some toning or trimming."

Harvard students have come to college to be educated. Many of these students do see this as an education of both the body and the mind and engage in athletic as well as intellectual pursuits. But the decisions to participate in such activities are made voluntarily, by individuals. Leave the mandatory nutrition seminars to Weight Watchers and fitness reigmen to the Naval Academy. Elisabeth Mayer '96