An Exceptional Class

When I sat down alone last Sunday at Annenberg, I spotted the behemoth that is the Sunday Boston Globe lying nearby. I wasn’t going to turn down any opportunity to seem busy in the eyes of judgmental passing freshmen, and I found a piece on a common, yet intriguing, subject of the Globe: trashing Harvard. In the opening paragraph of Christopher Shea’s article “Secret Societies: Can the Ivy League’s Big Three live down their history of discrimination?” Shea relates an anecdote about bigoted Harvard admissions policies from Berkeley Sociologist Jerome Karabel’s new book “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” In 1925, when a Harvard alumnus expressed “utter disgust” about the amount of Jews on the Harvard campus to then-President Abbot Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, Lowell replied that he “had foreseen the peril of having too large a number of an alien race and had tried to prevent it.” While Lowell’s overhaul of the admissions system discriminated against Jewish applicants at the time, the principles he advocated have ultimately led to a more diverse College body, and today give us a useful framework for understanding the value of all groups of students on campus—including recruited athletes.

During Lowell’s tenure, Harvard was struggling with the problem of reducing its number of Jewish students, which had climbed to 27 percent of the student body by the mid-1920s. In order to quell this influx of smart, seemingly-qualified students, the admissions office instituted a new framework with which to admit applicants; instead of just academic accomplishments and IQ tests, the admissions department would take into account human attributes like “moral character” and “manly vigor.” In following that philosophy, Wilbur J. Bender ’27, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid from 1952 to 1960, described his ideal Harvard student as “a good, healthy extrovert.”

In my limited experience at Harvard, I have already observed the benefits of Bender’s revised standard, which, despite the nefarious reasons for its implementation, remains an essential part of the College’s admissions policies. The student body today is diverse on numerous levels—racial, sexual, religious, social, academic—and each of those qualities is crucial in the general makeup of the community. However, this same type of apathy towards diversity that led to the marginalization of Jewish students persists in campus discourse. Unlike the 1920s though, this apathy is manifested in students’ derogatory attitude—not University Hall policies—towards the importance of athletes.

I have heard too often my peers lamenting that athletes do not contribute to this community because of their supposed lack of exceptional Harvard academic standards. This type of bigotry might appear to have an attenuated connection to the explicit, religious-based exclusion of Jews, but the overall goal of discrimination certainly resonates from these two examples. It is now all but dogma, and rightfully so, that discrimination is elitist and goes against the accepting values on which Harvard relies—values formulated in the cultural upheaval of the 1960s.

Accordingly, our admissions process, which rewards athletes’ skill outside the classroom, is just: those admitted bring to the College important qualities, and they are more than capable in the classroom as well. The authors of “The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values,” a book that condemns the preference of athletes in the college admissions process, write, “Athletes are more likely than others to be highly competitive, gregarious and confident of their ability to work well in groups (on teams).” This statement, which is attributed to former President of Princeton University William G. Bowen, should not be seen as an overarching rule without exceptions, but as a stereotype that may or may not apply to Harvard athletes. And in my short time at the College, varsity athletes’ participation in classes and comments in private conversations have made me a believer in the validity of this assertion.

Many students rightfully came to Harvard to be surrounded by exceptional people. It is sad that students are so quick to label fellow academics with 1600s on their SATs as “exceptional” but not give athletes a chance to earn that title. Harvard is not an institution that focuses exclusively on academics; Harvard breeds an inordinate share of scholars and Nobel laureates, but it also promotes journalism, musicianship, politics, as well as athletics. The College admissions office should stick with the status quo and not alienate athletes as Lowell tried to alienate Jews back in 1920s. Athletes’ intensive work deserves to be appreciated and accepted in this community just as much as anyone else’s area of expertise. They deserve the respect received by any other Harvard student—and particularly the respect of their peers.


Andrew D. Fine ’09 lives in Stoughton Hall.