Swimming Against the Tide

On Nov. 26, Dartmouth College Athletic Director Joann Harper announced her decision to cut the swimming and diving teams from the athletic budget after this year’s season. The elimination of these programs has been met with unrelenting protests by Dartmouth undergraduates, but these demonstrations reveal a dire lack of maturity among our counterparts in Hanover. Students must learn that ours is a world of limits, even in an illustrious Ivy League school like Dartmouth.

Apparently, hundreds of Dartmouth students are convinced that President James Wright, Dean of the College James Larimore and the rest of their administration decided to cut the programs as part of an embittered vendetta against a mediocre women’s team and an even worse men’s team, which hasn’t won a league meet in 40 years. The part of the story that isn’t told—possibly because it detracts from heroic student activism—is that Wright and Larimore have expressed significant personal regret about the decision and have explained that it was not a hasty solution but was a last-ditch effort after other alternatives failed.

In response to a 5.7 percent fall in the college’s endowment last year, Dartmouth cut its athletic budget by a relatively clement 2.5 percent. Athletic cuts of the last two years were applied evenly to all programs, and resulted in a decline in quality across the board. This convinced Harper that the overall excellence of athletics would best be served by eliminating one team instead of repeatedly cutting all programs. While the swimming and diving team ranks among the least successful of Dartmouth’s sports teams, a much more compelling justification should not be overlooked: the college’s swimming facilities require $20 million in renovations. Dartmouth’s total annual athletic budget for its remaining 32 teams is $10.8 million.

To say that Dartmouth should have had the foresight to improve facilities sooner is to completely miss the point of what has become the year’s college sports drama. What really matters here is that Dartmouth College exists primarily to educate its students, because it is committed to the belief that learned citizens are vital to the future of society. The pursuit of athletics can be part of that learning; sports reinforce the value of excellence, dedication and interpersonal skills. But athletics aren’t the priority; academic activities and facilities come first.

The three current swimming and diving coaches at Dartmouth, all of whom have been employed by the college for less than 10 years, will receive severance packages and help in finding jobs elsewhere. And students who currently swim or dive for Dartmouth will still be attending one of the most prestigious schools around.

Unless of course, they choose to transfer—an option some team members have pondered. That decision is understandable if, in the final analysis, swimming and diving count more to them than the distinction of Dartmouth’s academic program, and if their ultimate loyalty to Dartmouth is as athletes rather than students. There is truly no substitute for practicing a sport during one’s college years, at a time of irreplaceable youth and talent. But being a student-athlete is a privilege, not a right. Preoccupation with athletics can come at the expense of a college’s true assignments: teaching and learning. The students of Dartmouth College would do better to appreciate that the regrettable loss of their swimming and diving team is really the lesser of two evils.

—DANIEL B. HOLOCH