Deconstructing The Jock

Why do jocks exist?

The Harvard College presses are atwitter over the issue of jocks in the academe. In the past few weeks, Fifteen Minutes ran a 5,000-word jock-justifying “Scrutiny,” the Independent published an “Opinion Forum” on the matter, and even in this space a letter to the editor cooked up jock-hate over the brief mention in a Crimson Sports article of a first-year hockey player’s departure for more professional pastures. But why is so much pulp and ink being wasted without anyone’s saying anything remotely new?

Perhaps the squash players are threatening student newspapers with the old hardball or the women’s crew team is holding an oarblade to the throats of these writers. In the recent press accounts, the athlete is portrayed not only as the down-home charmer whose dog wears a bandana around its neck, but also as the conscientious bookworm who falls asleep contemplating chaos theory or what the most money you could win on “Jeopardy” is, if all the Daily Doubles came at the end of the rounds. We are admonished for our “misconception” that these athletes only got into Harvard because they could “dribble a basketball.” But no one thinks that. What they do think, and rightly, is that these athletes would not have gotten in if they could not dribble a basketball.

FM, in an article entitled, “For Love of the Game,” unmasks the Academic Index (AI), a shockingly imprecise formula that the Ivy League uses to make sure recruits aren’t too stupid. The writer shows how a valedictorian with a 1350 SAT and a highest SAT II of 750 would have an AI of 225 (the AI is calculated by assigning a score of one through 80 to the highest SAT I score, the highest SAT II score and class rank). He mentions, casually, that the Ivy League threshold for athletes is 169, but doesn’t bother breaking down that number. Allow me: Mr. 169 would have had an 1120 SAT (with a corresponding AI of 56), a 570 SAT II Writing test (57), and a class rank of 115 out of 400 (56). In other words, a Texas A&M candidate.

In the interview with FM, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 would not disclose the average College-wide AI, but it must be somewhere between 220 and 230 (Harvard reports that the middle 50 percent of its students fall within the 700-780 range for SAT I, that 90 percent of its students are in the top 10 percent of their high school class, and I’m guessing that the highest SAT II of an average Harvard student is 750, though it’s probably higher). So should we be reassured when coach Frank Sullivan swoons over his basketball team because not a single member has an AI below 180? Aye caramba.

Sure, there are some thick-necked pucksters and rafter-scratching hoopsters who would have gotten in if they were locked in the body of a pigeon-chested, sunlight-averse hypochondriac. And there are many athletes who actually do contribute to Harvard outside the gladiatorial arena. But their stories have not been trotted out in the current Harvard media coverage. Where are the sidelined athletes who made Phi Beta Kappa, who founded national sexual assault awareness groups, who were stringers for The Associated Press? You can find them if you know where to look.

But they are, frankly, beside the point. These athletes would be exceptions to prove the rule—namely, that the Admissions Committee at Harvard College is accepting, on average, athletes with lower aptitudes, lower scores, lower grades, who are less intelligent, and who have less to offer Harvard’s self-proclaimed “community of learning.” But the Admissions Committee knows this. They know everything about these athletic recruits, from their grades in AP U.S. History to the color of their swaddling clothes. And, to my way of thinking, they are, with a few exceptions, right to admit these jocks.

Why? According to Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73, students who have highly developed athletic skills are more charismatic, more disciplined, more motivated, more involved in college life and more likely to involve their roommates, friends and peers in the school. And, according to the exhaustively researched book The Game of Life, co-written by the former president of Princeton, for self- and extra-selecting reasons they will make more money as adults and are more likely to donate that money to their liberal arts alma maters. So, if Fitzsimmons tells FM that the admissions committee wants students who will make a “positive impact on the world for the next 60, 70, or 80 years,” then it seems reasonable for him to admit jocks (though please could we keep the AI above 190?).

Luckily for Harvard jocks and Harvard geeks alike, we were all chosen for a variety of reasons, not just grades, test scores or whatever—McGrath Lewis calls them “distinguishing excellences.” It may, in fact, be useful to ponder why we might have been chosen and what we can do to validate that choice.

To the athletes reading this, you may be among the minority that would have been chosen irrespective of athletic prowess. Probably, however, some of the justification for your selection lay in the attributes listed above. So, if you find yourself engaging in anti-social behavior like, say, cloistering yourself in the Owl with other jocks or humming eggs at other Harvard students at The Game (I’m looking at you, varsity baseball), remember why you are here. Yes, yes, you have a wicked slider. But you also should be engaging your fellow students and sprinkling your personality among the masses of downtrodden CS concentrators. And when you leave, follow your statistical destiny into financial services, make a lot of money and give some of it back to Harvard, where it will be distributed to the rest of us, the pigeon-chested, sunlight-averse hypochondriac Crimson columnists.

Couper Samuelson ’02 is a history and literature and French studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.