Myth of the 'Jock' and Intellectual Snobbery

According to the quick, unstrained, and often exciting method of thinking--that of pigeon holing and generalizations--Harvard is composed of three types: intellectuals, playboys, and jocks.

This is a horrifying reality to many people.

Nevertheless, all three are accepted categorical stereotypes which have been transferred from the quiet and naive, visually impressionable high school mind to the dinner table conversations in the Union and Houses. They are everyday terms used throughout the College to describe members of the undergraduate body.

The first is the intense young individual who values ideas and comments on academic problems with such insight and cleverness that he forgets to shave or wash. He is a grind and a recluse; he rots in Widener. The second is the companion of wine, women, and money. He talks it over in the Club in his oval-shaped Brooks Brothers suit. The third is the anti-intellectual slob--the animal. He grunts and sweats in Briggs Cage.

These are the men of Harvard--all here for an education, yet quite distinct in their extra-curricular ways in stressing either the academic, social, or athletic life.

Many observers in Cambridge believe that all Harvard men should be "intellectual." They point out that the "playboy" is a dying cause that went out with the Gold Coast and postwar Radcliffe, and crusade to exterminate the last real menace to the Harvard community, the "jock." He's a crude, embarrassingly inept social thing in an HAA sweat shirt--a C student at best, these people maintain, as they request more scholarly replacements to beef up the total intellectual output of the College. The most common disagreement is with the admissions policies of the University, which, they say, "have been guilty of admitting too many jocks."

The athlete, like the businessman, has evolved an image which a large nucleus of aspiring undergraduates and section men find fashionable to accept, avoid, and ridicule. They break down the Harvard community into "intellectuals" and "jocks"--heroes and villians--and force the athlete into a corner where he must ultimately explain himself.

This, unfortunately, seems to be part of the role of the athlete at Harvard--self-justification and disproof of the animal image--thrust upon him by a large number of his athletically apathetic and often cynical classmates. There is a definite tendency among the undergraduates and certain instructors almost self-consciously to separate the students into the two types, and, for those who want to be identified with the "intellectuals", to look down on the uncultured "jock." Although they may find this fun, they often take themselves seriously: certainly their attitude is immature and unfair, and more than likely results from a spirit of competition or a search for a source of prestige, or sometimes, from jealousy. (The case is the frustrated athlete.)

But in any discussion of the athlete at Harvard, one must first question the basic assumption--that the College is compoesd of two separate camps--animals and artists. "It has never seemed a useful distinction to me to divide the undergraduate body into athletes and non-athletes, as though these were discrete branches of the human species," David E. Owen, Master of Winthrop House, said recently. "Whether or not a man plays a varsity sport has little to do with his intellectual abilities and interests or his qualities as a social being."

Owen was asked what he thought about the popular distinction between the "intellectual" and the "jock" at Harvard. "Rather than that, let's make the distinction between the jock and the athlete," he replied, insisting that the implications of the loaded term "jock" unduly smear many valuable citizens and serious students who happen to participate in athletics. Only a handful of students qualify for the unattractive term "jock", Owen noted, declaring that too many gentlemen get lumped together and become identified with the reputations and actions of the few--a strikingly small minority. "I suppose there are a few students who never should have been admitted," Wilbur J. Bender '27, former Dean of Admissions, said in a recent interview. "But they are very rare indeed."

"I don't like the word jock," Bender continued. "It is unfair and unjustified. It implies thickheadedness and a segregated group of misfits, and improperly labels a lot of good people."

The athlete at Harvard may be part of a distinct group of students, but he should not be accepted or considered as part of an inferior group of students. All kinds of awards, scholarships, and statistics could serve as witnesses in this argument. The first four class Marshals this year, for example,--Charlie Ravenel, Newell Flather, Tom Blodgett, and Bruce MacIntyre are all outstanding personalities who participated in athletics. If the reader regards the Class Marshal elections as mere popularity contests, he should take note of a statistical study made in 1954 on the percentage of distribution among various rank list groups of undergraduates and selected student and alumni groups. the two athletic organizations studied, the crews and varsity football, placed nobody in Group I--but neither did the CRIMSON and the Student Council. The athletes had a smaller percentage of their students in Group II, but they had essentially the same percentage displacement (approximately 75 per cent) in Groups III, IV, and V, as did the others, including the Corporation, Overseers and Alumni Directors; the University Choir and Glee Club; and the whole undergraduate body in addition to the CRIMSON and Council.

In short, from all evidence the athletes as a group are not to any great degree different academically from any other organization. Every Harvard administrator interviewed for this article saw no significant academic inferiority among the athletes.

"There is not that much variation between the academic records of the undergraduate organizations," Sargent Kennedy '28, Registrar, declared. He, like Owen and Bender, sees no definite factors which distinguish the athlete as a student from other "types" of undergraduates.

Bender, who feels strongly that C students are necessary for a "dynamic" community, said: "I think it would be most unfortunate if there were a group set aside from the student body by qualities and attitudes derived from participation in athletics. From my experience, this has not been true.'

"There is a tendency for students to wall themselves off into separte groups in terms of their own sets of prejudices and interests," Bender admitted, generalizing on the various group personalities he has observed: "My general impression is that boys with athletic abilities and interests tend to be more broad-minded and have a greater breadth of interests than members of other groups. The self-conscious intellectuals, for example, tend to be more narrow and restricted in their interests, and are usually more arrogant in their approach to problems than are the athletes.

"My guess is that the whole group of varsity letter winners is less cohesive than, say, the dramatists or the CRIMSON editors," he said. About the 700-odd freshmen and varsity letter winners who make up about 1/6th of the College, Bender remarked: "They would probably represent a good cross-section of the whole class."

Bender's favorite example of athletic importance is that of the University of Chicago, which eliminated its athletic programs just before the war in an all-out effort for intellectual progress. "Afterward," Bender points out, "they found out that the intellectuals, in quotes, were not really as smart as they thought and that the non-intellectuals, in quotes, were really quite valuable after all." Their experiment resulted in a lop-sided student body of "narrow intellectuals," and the school's appeal declined so much that five years ago the administration had trouble finding enough students to fill its quotas.

The athletes may be primarily B and C students, (so are the majority of the undergraduates at Harvard), but they are not an inferior element or a hindrance to the college community, as the University of Chicago experiment showed.

Partly as a result of the "shining example" of the Chicago experiment, and partly from his own experience, Bender is led to make comments such as "The A student is very often quite stupid," and, "An awful lot of thick and narrow students grind out A's.

"It doesn't follow that the C students are brilliant," he added, "but they are vitally necessary. For example, during my time, most of the men who became great contributors to society had highly undistinguished records at Harvard."

Who, then, is the athlete at Harvard? He's not always the Group I or II student, nor is he the Group VI hanger-on. He may be one of the students in the 550-650 range in the SAT's who swung the admissions committee over to his side by favorable extra-curricular abilities, as do members of the Glee Club, band, Crimson, also. He may be a gentleman, and he may be socially ungraceful. "Harvard is a mixed bag," Bender noted quite keenly: "You can say almost anything, cite examples, and prove it."

What can be said about the athlete at Harvard with reasonable assurance is that he is not motivated by images of glory and heroism. There are no campus heroes around Cambridge; graduating with honors is valued higher than winning a letter and beating Yale.

"The real question in my mind is the basic value of athletics," Bender said. "What are the athletic programs worth, in terms of our expenditures and the students' interests." Undeniably, Harvard never admits students because it wants their bodies rather than their minds, and it never encourages inordinate athletic activity by offering easy programs such as Physical Education.

What, then, keeps the athlete at Harvard going?

Some quit. They are frequently high school standouts from the Mid-west who always thought of colleges in terms of football teams, and who come to Harvard--a new horizon. They find the exciting display of academic purpose too inviting.

A second type waxes in athletic ability and interest while he is here, as did the sparky fullback from Cherokee, Iowa, Jim Nelson. Called "crazy-legs" because he ran in what appeared to be an awkward manner in his freshman and sophomore years, Nelson last fall was billed as the man who went "from stand-in to standout." At the end of the season he won the New England senior football award.

A third type of athlete at Harvard never dies. He is the Charlie Ravenel or the Mark Mullin, who just keeps going ahead in athletics with an interminable drive, determination, and winning enthusiasm for his sport all the way through school. To these people, athletics is a way of life. "My whole life has centered around athletics," Revenel said recently. "I owe everything to sports." He is the first Class Marshal this year, has received a $5,000 scholarship from Corning Glass Company to travel around the world, has been named co-recipient of the Bingham Award for this year, and has been admitted into Harvard Business School. That's a lot to owe to sports.

Ravenel played football because he had the feeling that "It was what I was meant to do," because he loved the game, and because he wanted to keep his body in shape. Of course, the memorable quarterback who also plays baseball wanted to win, also. Some athletes play for headlines, others use athletics for self-discipline and private goals of accomplishment, agreeing with President Kennedy '40 that the health of the mind is directly proportional to the health of the body. Still others play because they want it on their record for graduate school. And then there are some who participate because they need a place to vent rage and frustrations. Every man has his own reason.

But anti-jockism at Harvard is as bad as anti-intellectualism; neither type of personality under attack really exists per se at Harvard, and there is no reason why a varsity athlete can't dispel the erroneous triad of stero-types by joining a final club and getting A's. To those who ask "What the hell are you doing down at that wet, muddy field with a bunch of robot-animals when you could be expanding your knowledge by reading or studying?" the athlete can reply "Accumulating a college experience" with as much validity and pride as a member of the CRIMSON, Glee Club, or Student Council.

"Harvard probably has more screwed-up oddballs then any other College," Bender declared, adding parenthetically that he would "hate to see it without any, however."

The athletes don't apply, Bender asserts: "If the term 'jock' can seriously be used at Harvard, then something should be done. At present, I don't think it is a term that can be used."