Balancing Sports and Scholarship

If you visit almost any collegiate campus on an autumn Sunday afternoon, the sights and sounds are strikingly similar. There are the students, there are the alumni...and there is a football game.

In some places, such as South Bend and Ann Arbor, the game is the centerpiece if a weekend-long celebration which consumes the entire school as thousands of alumni make a pilgrimage to join thousands of screaming students and watch their favorite sons vie for a national championship. Here in the Ivy League, of course, things are a little different. Far from seeing a great carnival, a person standing in the middle of the Yard might not even realize a game was going on, save for the occasional fly-by by the marching band.

But the Ivy League was not always the backwater of the college football world. In the early part of the century it was the center of it, with Harvard even having a Rose Bowl victory and national championships to its name. While few students today are cognizant of this glorious past--or consider it of any consequence--it is very much on the mind of many alumni, some of whom are among the University's largest donors, who come to Soldiers Field.

It is somewhere in the midst of this contradiction between the reality of Ivy football and its past that problems begin to arise for these schools. They must try to put on a team good enough to make alumni happy without completely forsaking academic integrity. Though Harvard, and for that matter the other schools, realize they cannot compete with Nebraska, they care deeply about being the best in the league.

If anyone doubts the intensity with which Ivy coaches recruit against one another, one need look no further than the aftermath of the unfortunate incident last spring, when a prospective recruit was beaten by another player during a campus visit. According to several alumni athletic boosters, other league coaches did not miss a beat in using the incident to convince high school players that Cambridge was not the place for them.

The Ivy League has recognized the trials of trying to be a football conference while keeping academic standards high, and as a result, introduced something in 1985 called an academic index (AI) to regulate the scholastic abilities of the incoming football players, of whom an average of 35 are allowed in each year.

Described by Sports Illustrated as "a complex piece of athletic-admissions voodoo," the index is comprised of three categories: high school grades, SAT or ACT scores and SAT II scores. Each recruit receives a score out of 80 in each category, and in order to be eligible for admission in the Ivy League needs a composite score of at least 161.

But beyond the common minimum standard, the index treats each school differently. It specifies that the schools are held to admissions standard based on the academic level of the rest of the student body. The way the system works is that each school faces three levels of scores, with a maximum of 10 allowed from the lower band and 15 from the middle one (though the specific formulas get more complex). The numbers corresponding to the bands differ with the school, so Penn and Cornell are given more leeway in recruiting than Harvard or Yale.

It seems a bizarre compromise, especially for schools who so vocally and frequently deny making athletic exceptions. And though it was set up to be a panacea for the league's ills, this regulatory system seems to be fulfilling none of the University's possible goals particularly well.

On the one hand, if the goal is to create a competitive football league, it would seem predestined to fail. Holding some schools to more stringent standards than others insures that over time the academically less competitive schools become the athletic powerhouses, or at the very least are presented with that opportunity, while the more academically competitive ones are faced with a major handicap. And the recent dominance of three-time defending Ivy League champion Penn indicates that has already happened.

Any doubt as to the existence of a correlation between academic exemptions and on-field performance seems to be removed with a glance at the Columbia football team; formerly the doormat of the league, it has recently regained respectability. According to one University donor and athletic booster, "It's no secret they decided Columbia needed to be more competitive, so they let them relax their standards a little bit more."

But if the University went along with the AI in the hope of preserving academic integrity, it was at most a half-hearted effort. The schools are admitting, contrary to every public statement they make, that they put football players in a completely different admissions category, where the athlete clearly takes precedence over the student part of the student-athlete. The index takes the admission decision out of the realm of the University honor and insures it will bend its academic standards a set number of times in the search for gridiron glory.

While the University could either opt for a good team or stringent academic standards, with the AI it is left with neither. What it is able to do is have something that it can show to both sides and pretend to give them each what they want.

The University needs to make up its mind. It should either demand the entire league is held to the same standards (and be competitive), or opt out of the formulaic exceptions and declare it will accept students on a basis with which its admissions office feels comfortable. At least let the students, alumni and others know what is really going on and force the administration to be clear about its actions and its goals.