Admissions Polarizes Athletes, Non-Athletes

Re: “Amateurism On and Off the Field,” op-ed, Apr. 21.

As a private institution, Harvard’s athletic policies are ultimately its own business. That means that if the College decides to continue to recruit top-notch athletes for its Division One teams, then so be it. But Harvard must also accept the consequences of that policy. One of the most obvious of these consequences is that the two admissions tracks into Harvard—one for athletes and one for everyone else—institutionalize the disconnect between athletes and non-athletes that former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 laments. Lewis holds students and people like former Princeton president William G. Bowden responsible for not regarding athletes as “regular students,” and charges that this attitude of “public contempt” is the last acceptable prejudice at Harvard. I share his concern. But it is primarily the policies of the College itself, not the prejudices of athletes or non-athletes, that create this condition.

It’s simply not reasonable to expect either recruited athletes or their non-athlete classmates to pretend they don’t know about the very different ways they arrived at Harvard. If Lewis wants these two groups to respect each other, he must reckon with the College’s own role in fostering, through its parallel admissions tracks, a climate in which athletes and non-athletes often do not think of one another as genuine peers. It is those admissions practices, far more than any lingering fondness for 19th-century British notions about amateurism, which perpetuate the unfortunate divide between athletes and non-athletes at Harvard.

ALAN E. WIRZBICKI ’01

Washington, D.C.

April 24, 2006



The writer was president of The Crimson in 2000.