Letter To The Editor

To the Editor:

This evening I picked up a copy of The Crimson and was startled to see on the front page a “colorful” pie chart showing the “ethnicity” of recruited athletes in the class of 2017. My immediate, gut reaction was: That’s racist. After actually reading the article, I agreed with myself.

What logical reason is there to put that pie chart front and center?  Recruited athletes are a small part of Harvard’s student body; why do they warrant their own pie chart dissecting their “ethnicity?”  (“Black” is not an ethnicity, by the way.)  All the other infographics are based on 100 percent of the student body. After all, the article is supposedly about the entire class of 2017. That pie chart alone applies to a very small portion of the incoming class.

Furthermore, it seems irresponsible to write this front-page story without using proper methodology in the way you administered your survey and printed its “results.” The article said 80 percent of the class “responded” to the survey, but the number of completed surveys was not reported. I don’t know what the survey sent out by The Crimson looked like, but based on the “statistics” reported in the article, it seems like some leading or biased questions may have been asked. For example, I’d like to know what questions were asked to arrive at this formulation:  “Students who went to public high school were more likely than their private school counterparts to say they intend to seek out careers in education or health 10 years after graduation, and private school students were disproportionately attracted to eventual work in business, finance, and arts, sports, or entertainment.” What are the reasons for and implications of this “10 years after graduation,” “eventual work” language?

Lastly, you said only three recruited athletes said they were homosexual, bisexual, questioning, or other.  If you felt the need to include this information, perhaps it would have been more responsible to remind readers that only three of the recruited athletes who actually completed the survey said they were not heterosexual.

What is this survey even supposed to be about? There is the racial and sexual orientation aspect, the bizarre “expected payroll” aspect (“Hey, prefrosh! Are you gonna make $49,000 or $51,000 in 2021?” Those questions seem more like a psych survey than one attempting to profile a class), and other strange and arbitrary statements about birth order and career paths. Please use more rigorous methodology and responsible reporting.

Margaret Wittenmyer ’14 is a Government concentrator in Kirkland House.