Strong Athletics and Academics Can Co-Exist

To the editors:



As a member of the Harvard men’s hockey team, I take exception to Lucy Caldwell’s article (“Are Jocks Necessary?” column, March 7) questioning the necessity of jocks at Harvard. While her argument is inherently flawed on the whole, there are a few major points of contention I found simply uninformed and inaccurate.

First, her argument that Harvard would do well to accept mediocrity in athletics is ridiculous. Harvard’s core creed is really to strive for excellence in everything it does; it only admits the best, brightest, and most talented students in the world. I don’t see why athletics should be an exception here. Through its history, Harvard has traditionally been an athletic power in certain sports, such as hockey, squash, and rowing, and its academic reputation has certainly not suffered because of this. Take a school like Stanford, which is widely renowned for being a powerhouse in many big time Division 1 sports, including basketball, baseball and football, probably the three most widely competitive sports nationally. All the while, the Cardinal maintains an elite national reputation and lofty academic standards. It clearly can be done. Simply look to our hockey team, which has consistently been one of the nation’s top 15 programs, winning a NCAA title in 1989, making the Frozen Four multiple times, and qualifying for the NCAA tournament, a field of the countries top 16 teams, five of the last six years. It is a ludicrous and downright ignorant assertion that you can’t have elite teams without making wholesale academic sacrifices.

Two points seem to be central to Caldwell’s sweeping assertion—the first being the underlying assumption that athletes here are somehow hugely academically inferior to other students, which is just absurd. Every athlete that gets in does so because he or she is capable of doing the work, its just an admissions fact. And while I don’t deny that many of us might not have been admitted on grades alone, the fact is that playing sports is a valuable skill, just like playing an instrument, singing in a band, or being a science fair winner. Harvard looks to admit excellent people, and just like in real life, excellence is not all about what you got on your SAT. Apparently no one ever told Lucy Caldwell this.

The second assertion of her oblivious argument appears to be that somehow every truly high-end recruit is some poor, stupid kid with no chance at getting into Harvard without athletics. It is as if she has this picture of some kid on the streets who’s got skills, but can’t read. She needs to descend from her ivory tower of stereotypes. Many of our best players—among them potential NHL draft picks—are also some of our smartest. Maybe that doesn’t fit into Caldwell’s image of the world, but that’s on her—not the talented Crimson athletes.

Finally, the idea that Harvard could somehow singlehandedly change the culture of college sports is just ridiculous. How, in our competitive and sports-obsessed culture, could Harvard begin to make the nation’s sports programs, which generate millions of dollars, not to mention tons of free publicity and school pride, take a more nonchalant approach to recruiting? This is neither feasible nor desirable. One of the great things a person can do is strive for excellence in athletics. It gives you purpose, direction, and happiness in a world where these commodities are scarce. So instead of accepting Caldwell’s vision of university full of nerds, loser athletes, and mediocrity, we should continue pursuing the true ideal of Harvard—working hard at being the best at what we do, whatever that happens to be.



IAN M. TALLETT ’10

Cambridge, Mass.

March 9, 2008