True Academic Integration

The banner that serves as a header to every page of the Harvard University Athletics website is emblazoned with the words “Academic Integration, Competitive Excellence.” Here, and more explicitly on the Athletic Department’s recruiting page, the University proudly touts the academic and athletic opportunities offered to its undergraduate student-athletes. The unfortunate truth, however, is that many student-athletes are finding academic integration to be incompatible with their efforts towards competitive excellence; in fact, the opposite is too often true, as practice schedules for athletics can sometimes inhibit academic exploration. Rather than finding themselves able to pursue their desired course of study while also competing as an athlete for the University, many student-athletes find that their academic and athletic interests conflict logistically.

We firmly believe that Harvard students should never have to compromise their academic goals to pursue their extracurricular ones—or their extracurricular goals for their academic ones, for that matter. At this time, when the College finds itself at a crossroads of campus expansion and administrative overhaul, Harvard is well-positioned to rectify these issues.

The Problem

The commitment that student-athletes make to their sport is unique in a few key ways. Before arriving on campus, student-athletes commit not only to being students at the College, but also to competing for the University’s varsity athletic teams—a commitment that includes daily team practices and conditioning sessions as well as games that often require travel across state borders. A significant portion of a student-athlete’s day is consistently devoted to his or her sport, without any of the schedule flexibility or distribution that characterizes other extracurricular activities. In sum, student-athletes lack the luxury of tailoring their extracurricular schedule to fit their academic interests; instead, that commitment to the team means that student-athletes’ academic schedules must be organized around practice schedule rather than vice versa.

This problem is neither new nor unique: Issues with scheduling conflicts have plagued the College in the past, and student-athletes at Yale have also complained of similar obstacles. In the past year, the issue came to prominence during the UC campaign of Nick E. Gajdzik ’16-’17 and Jeffrey M. Ott ’16-’17, two members of the varsity wrestling team. Ott was disappointed to find that his wrestling practice schedule “played a huge factor in which concentration [he] was able to do.” Ott arrived at Harvard hoping to pursue both his interest in ornithology and his commitment to the wrestling program; yet, he soon discovered that certain classes required for Organismic and Evolutionary Biology conflicted with his afternoon wrestling practices. Though he was, and still is, wildly passionate about the study of birds, pursuing OEB would have meant missing two wrestling practices a week—a sacrifice that he was unwilling to make.

In theory, such a sacrifice is required by neither the College nor the Department of Athletics; student-athletes are allowed to miss practice time if a conflict exists between their athletic and academic commitments. This solution, though, is impractical and unreasonable given the expectations accompanying the commitment that student-athletes make to their sports and their teammates. Moreover, forcing Harvard’s student-athletes to choose between class time and practice time appears counterintuitive in light of the stated mission to combine “academic integration” with “competitive excellence.”

Moving Forward

At this point in time—in the midst of overhauls of both the Program in General Education and and the course schedule—the University is particularly well positioned to consider how it can better serve its students and stay true to its mission of “creating and sustaining the conditions that enable all Harvard College students to experience an unparalleled educational journey that is intellectually, socially, and personally transformative.” Now is the perfect time to tweak the undergraduate academic schedule so that it empowers, rather than hinders, students in their efforts to pursue the studies and activities they love.

One possible solution is to designate a period of time, between two to three hours, each afternoon expressly for extracurricular and athletic activities, ensuring that there would be no conflict between academics and other activities. Schools such as MIT, Princeton, and Cornell have already implemented similar blocks of time. Though this solution may not be feasible on our campus, we believe that the principle nevertheless stands: In charting a new course schedule, the administration must take into careful consideration the conflicts that the current schedule—and any future schedule—creates for student-athletes.

The benefits of a new schedule are not confined to those who are varsity athletes. After all, student-athletes are not the only members of the College community that must face the problem of balancing academics and extracurriculars. On the contrary, the commitments that students make to writing for a publication, doing community service through PBHA, or participating in theater are no less important or worthwhile than a commitment to athletics, and often equally time-consuming. As Ott eloquently argued, “The dichotomy that we’re assuming is that we have ‘student-athletes’ and then we have ‘students,’ but in reality… we have student-athletes and then we have student-editorial writers, we have student-cello players.”

In short, the potential for conflicts to arise in declaring a concentration does not fall solely on student-athletes, but also potentially on any student who has a serious commitment to an extracurricular activity. A new course schedule that frees student-athletes of conflicts between their academic and athletic commitments could provide widespread benefits for the entire student body, by also preventing conflicts between academic and extracurricular commitments.

Conclusion

Both of the course schedules proposed a month ago to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences represent substantial steps in the right direction, by providing for more flexibility in the scheduling of courses, especially seminars, tutorials, and labs. We hope that, in considering these proposals, as well as other potential schedules, the Faculty keeps in mind the sacrifices that student-athletes at the College are forced to make every semester, between the classes they want to take and the sport that they have committed to, between their pursuit of competitive excellence and their desire for academic integration with the rest of the College. For the University to truly fulfill its academic mission, every concentration must be a logistical possibility for every undergraduate student. The choice that exists today—between athletics and academics, and sometimes, between extracurriculars and academics—should not remain in the fall of 2018. As Ott stated, we hope that all student-athletes will be given a full opportunity to “pursue their academics. Because that’s something that Harvard… really pushes; they support your interests. If you want to do something, there should be no barriers.”