Learning From Quakers

The recent athletic budget cuts at the University of Pennsylvania raise the possibility of a similar scenario occurring at other Ivy institutions. The aggressive, organized response of Penn students to the elimination of several athletic teams points up a related question with respect to Harvard: In the absence of a crisis, how much input do students have into our athletic department?

At present, two major avenues for student input exist: the Standing Committee on Athletic Sports, chaired by James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, and the various House student athletic secretaries, analogous to an intramural council. There are five student members on the standing committee, but can you name them? (They are Carlos Cordeiro, Katherine Fulton, Larry Hobdy, Lou Marczuk, and Panayote Dimitras.)

In addition, the meetings of this potentially vital committee, whose membership includes Dean Fox, Judith B. Walzer, associate dean of Radcliffe College, Chase N. Peterson, vice-president for alumni affairs, and others, are never publicized.

The athletic secretaries are paid, but harried workers whose decisions often represent personal, albeit benevolent, opinion, rather than the views of the students they serve.

What it all boils down to is that despite these mechanisms, the diversity of student opinion is not adequately incorporated into the athletic department's administrative decision-making process.

At Penn, the athletic department made the recent cuts without prior students' or coaches' knowledge. Shocked and dismayed by the decimating announcement, Penn's athletic community scrambled to counteract the administration's edicts. The students succeeded in reinstating all sports but hockey; however, if the athletic department had consulted students and coaches beforehand, the negotiations might never have been necessary.

Harvard should learn from the Penn debacle and move to shore up the gaps in the scope and range of student representation in athletic decision-making. The fact that all four undergraduate members of the standing committee are seniors is a structural deficiency of that body.

Additionally, last year's controversy over the criteria for selecting a new athletic director (a controversy which pitted the interests of varsity athletes against the broader desires of the Harvard athletic community), provided an ironic contrast to the Harvard ideal of "athletics for all."

Athletic director Jack Reardon has thus far done a capable job in dealing with the various factions of Harvard's athletic community. But Reardon's job does not leave him time to accurately discern the diversity of student opinion on athletics at Harvard. Reardon should heed the events at Penn and move beyond the boundaries of his position to establish an innovative system.

For several months now, since the departure of Baaron Pittenger to the U.S. Olympic Committee, the position of associate director of athletics has remained vacant. The easy way to fill such an opening would be to appoint yet another bureaucrat skilled in the various aspects of athletic administration.

A creative alternative would be to restructure this position by dramatically altering both the selection criteria for, and the responsibilities of, the post. The applicant selected should be a recent Harvard graduate (within the last three years) who would receive a four-year, non-renewable contract. At the end of his four-year term, after having followed a class through Harvard, the associate director's position would again be opened to a more recent Harvard graduate.

This system would promote a continually evolving perspective within the upper echelons of the athletic administration. The associate director, with a mandate to immerse himself in direct liaison work with the student community, would not have the bureaucratic and contractual restrictions of his predecessors. He would thus be free to concentrate his energy on establishing and insuring the continued effectiveness of new student and student-Faculty groups concerned with the administrative process.

The current machinery has never been put to a stern test like the one that faced Penn students and administrators last week. Hopefully, Harvard will not wait for a similar crisis to discover the true mettle of its student-athletic department relationship; rather, it should move now to improve this pattern of interaction before Harvard becomes yet another lesson.