Sports and the New Scholar-Athlete

The facts and statistics surrounding the questions about the (dubious?) mutual amiability of Ivy League sports and Ivy league scholarship are highly ambiguous, and largely inconclusive. One example:

The GPA of varsity athletes at Ivy League schools, studies show, are generally consistent with the academic performance of the larger student body. There is a qualifier here, however: many commentators have observed that the students with the team-boosting GPAs are not the players who play a lot, or who are crucial to the team's success. The athletically dispensable, then, are academically essential, since it is these bench players that keep the team grade point averages respectable.

Another example: roughly two-thirds of the students enrolled in English 2/3, Dartmouth's two-term substitute for freshman English 5, are varsity athletes — an absurdly disproportionate figure. Varsity athletes make up less than a third of the student body as a whole. But conversations with the student tutors for English 2/3 have revealed that these varsity athletes (supposedly the bottom of the academic barrel) are not intellectually or academically distinguishable from the rest of the Dartmouth pile.

These tutors also explain that freshman athletes are shuttled into English 2/3 even when they don't need it, because they and their coaches are concerned that academic failure may make them ineligible to compete. Also, these tutors say, many athletes buy into existing stigmas and assume themselves to be less academically promising than, in fact, they are.

All of which seems to conclude that the present crop of athletes at Dartmouth are just as diligent, intelligent, and able as the rest of the student body.

What is worrying, instead, is a series of signs that suggest that the Ivy League is becoming more consciously a nationally competitive sporting entity, and a related set of factors that indicate a fairly appalling set of safeguards for maintaining academic legitimacy.

The Marcellus Wiley case is a notable example. On a campus tour I took my freshman year, the student guide made a special point of noting how difficult it is to transfer credits to Columbia, because of their strict core curriculum. “One girl I know transferred from Brown with only two credits,” she said, “and a girl who graduated last year came here from Harvard as a sophomore again, but Columbia wouldn't take a single credit. But Marcellus Wiley, the star of Ray Tellier's 1996 and 1997 Lion squads (and as terrifying a defensive end as has ever played in the Ivy League, now with the Buffalo Bills) was able to transfer an entire year's worth of credits from West Los Angeles Community College, which, rumor has it, is not exactly Harvard. Columbia has a rigorous core curriculum, it's true, but it's also got a class (specifically designed for athletes) that substitutes for “Literature and Humanities,” the basic Columbia core course.

Further anecdotal evidence supports this argument. Recruited athletes regularly have SAT scores dipping into the mid-1100s. This means that at schools where most students are in the 99th percentile nationally, recruited athletes are regularly in the 60th percentile — intellectually mediocre. SATs, of course, are not perfect predictors of anything, but national studies have repeatedly shown that they are far and away the best indicators of which students will succeed academically in College — and enjoy it.

All of this comes in a climate of administrative permissiveness, a climate not limited to Columbia: a member of Dartmouth's basketball team was admitted to six Ivy League schools that he never submitted an application to.

The Dartmouth Review's reporters spoke to a whole host of Ivy League coaches, and all of them acknowledged a basic fact: in the last few years, the Ivy League has begun to think of itself in a wholly national context — in terms of recruiting, in terms of the teams in sees itself in competition with.

This national consciousness has taken a clear grip of the Ivy League's coaches (most pronouncedly in men's basketball, but in other sports as well), and this is far from a good thing. The increased quality of Ivy League athletics is all well and good, but it should not come at the wholesale expense of academic standards. The evidence collected here is worrying, since it suggests that Ivy League sports programs may not be held in sufficient administrative check.

An athletic campus is a good thing. Learning does not take place strictly in the classroom, and Dartmouth has an interest in developing full characters in its' graduates. But this does not give it license to abandon it's primary mission, which is the intellectual mission.

— Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Editor-in-Chief