Feinstein Defends Ivy Model for Athletics

Harvard doesn’t belong to the world of major Division I college athletics and it shouldn’t want to, noted author and radio commentator John Feinstein told an audience of over 100 people during a panel discussion at Harvard’s Murr Center on Friday afternoon.

The event, titled “Harvard and March Madness: Mutually Exclusive?” featured Feinstein, Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan and former Big East commissioner and Dartmouth men’s basketball coach Dave Gavitt in a discussion on the evolution of college basketball and Harvard’s place in the sport.

Feinstein praised the Ivy League model of athletics for putting the interests of student-athletes first and staving off the forces of corruption he said have hurt much of the NCAA. He pointed to corporate greed as the driving force behind the for-profit professionalization of amateur athletics and cited declining academic standards and low graduation rates as its fallout.

“There is the question of whether Harvard fits into the NCAA and big-time athletics today,” Feinstein said. “The answer is no, and you should be damn proud of it.”

Feinstein is the author of the book “The Last Amateurs,” which hailed the Patriot League—a small conference which grants few athletic scholarships—as one of the last remaining bastions of amateur athletics. In contrast, Feinstein pointed to the University of Maryland’s decision to retire the jersey number of former star Steve Francis—who declared for the NBA draft after just one year in college and never graduated—as representative of many schools’ misplaced priorities. “Harvard doesn’t want that. Harvard shouldn’t want that,” he said.

According to Feinstein, Harvard “could be Duke tomorrow” if it decided to place a greater emphasis on its competitiveness in Division I basketball. But that’s a trade-off Harvard is rightfully unwilling to make, he said.

“Any team that wants to make the Sweet Sixteen has to make a deal with the devil,” Feinstein said.

“It’s hard for me to go to ACC games now,” added Feinstein, a Duke University alumnus. “I know too much.”

Ryan and Gavitt acknowledged Feinstein’s concerns about the current state of college basketball. But Ryan suggested that, given the massive spectacle that the men’s NCAA tournament has become, the American public tends to focus on the sport’s entertainment value rather than the dark secrets to some schools’ success.

“I don’t know as much as John knows, but I know enough,” Ryan said. “I just don’t want to think about it when I get to the Final Four.”

“When the ball goes up, all that stuff is off the table,” he added.

But Feinstein insisted that the rise in college basketball’s popularity and its huge revenue stream has caused schools to stray from what should be their top priority—the athletes.

“The thing wrong with the NCAA is the idea that Ohio State-Miami matters more than Harvard-Yale, Army-Navy or Wesleyan-Williams,” Feinstein said. “It doesn’t. It makes more money, no question about it. But to the kids who play the games, it matters just as much.”

Gavitt, who recalled the days during the 1950s and 1960s when Ivy teams were fixtures in the national college basketball scene, said that Ivies’ current struggle to compete nationally can be linked to the format of their need-based financial aid policies. He noted that attending Harvard or Yale is often the least cost-effective option for high school athletes and suggested that the entire conference move to a system of fully-funded aid packages that would not include loans.

Feinstein supported the idea, noting that the Ivy model, though praiseworthy, likely could not be applied at most other colleges.

“The Ivy League doesn’t give athletic scholarships, because it doesn’t have to,” he said. “Harvard is still Harvard, Yale is still Yale, Princeton is still Princeton.”

Gavitt concurred that the Ivies’ stance is unlikely to be adopted elsewhere. He expressed regret that as the Ivy schools have become less competitive in Division I, the once highly influential voices of the conference’s athletic directors have become silent.

“I think the Ivy model is a great one,” Gavitt said when asked if he thought the Ivy League should begin awarding athletic scholarships. “The rest of the country just won’t [adopt] it because they don’t trust each other.”

Feinstein concluded the discussion with a challenge to the Ivy League to allow its football teams to compete in the Division I-AA tournament and also to move to a conference tournament in basketball. These steps, he said, only make sense in light of the league’s stand on behalf of its student-athletes as the ones who “should matter the most.”

—Staff writer Brian E. Fallon can be reached at bfallon@fas.harvard.edu.