Shots in the Dark

6 Responses

• Harry Lewis
  4/15/2013 1:09 pm

  As the Penn alum said, “We were all right at Pennsylvania two years ago, but undergraduates and alumni felt that we had to do as the other colleges were doing.” That was in 1905. (“The College Athlete,” Henry Beach Needham, McClure’s Magazine, 25, 2) In fact, Yale’s admissions standards aren’t what they used to be — they are probably higher now, though of course it depends on the metric.

• richardbradley
  4/15/2013 1:59 pm

  Meaning that Yale recruits better hockey players than it used to, Harry?

  I don’t mean to be cynical, but the truth is that, by and large, you can not reach this level of athletic accomplishment and still perform the level of academic work and thinking that we want to expect of Yale and Harvard. When I was at Yale, the hockey team was pretty good, but everyone knew that the hockey players weren’t generally intellectual heavyweights (and also that they tended to produce more drunken, violent behavior than, say, fencers or physics majors.) It’s hard to believe that,as the hockey team has gotten better, it’s also gotten more studious.

  I’m sure that one gets the occasional exception who is both the great athlete and the remarkable scholar. And athletes contribute to college life in other ways. But clearly I’m more uncomfortable than you are with the idea of Ivy League teams competing for national championships, whether in hockey or basketball. This way corruption lies-and as murky as the circumstances in the Harvard cheating scandal are, it seems that Harvard has already experienced that lesson.

• Harry Lewis
  4/15/2013 3:29 pm

  I understand the worries, and I suppose I am glad you are worried about Yale, because it is a lot harder to win the NCAA ice hockey championship than it is to win one game in the men’s basketball tournament. At the same time, it is getting to be a tired trope to throw mud at two of the scores of kids Harvard disciplined in that so called cheating scandal because they are basketball players, when that whole witch hunt has been so shameful. And I don’t get why you think it’s OK to imply that your hockey team is a bunch of violent thugs, because “everybody knew” the hockey players were violent thugs in your day, and these players are better. Does this sort of thing meet any elemental standard of fairness that you would expect if the discussion were about an ethnic group, for example?

  Ivy athletics is a highly regulated system. If I ran the zoo, it would be even more tightly regulated, and the Ivy League admissions agreements would be more stringent, even if it meant that what happened to Yale hockey and Harvard basketball this year became even rarer. But it’s an intercollegiate competition among schools that hold themselves to higher academic standards than the rest of the NCAA. Argue for higher standards league wide if you really are worried that it is bad to be this good at college sports; one of the premises of the Ivy League is that “The member schools ought to look primarily within the Group for standards of competitive excellence and, for most sports, ought to measure success or failure in competition with each other.” It would be fairer to press on that than than to throw around all these snarky suggestions about the actual human beings who are winning these games.

• Harry Lewis
  4/15/2013 8:28 pm

  Awful day. I live a block off the Marathon route. As a kid I lived a quarter mile from the route. I have stood in the crowds along the route probably 50 times in my life. Last year I took my freshman seminar down to the route to watch the runners go by. Could have been any of us. 3 dead now. Hard to think this wonderful event will ever be the same.

  But I owe you a straight answer to your question, “Yale recruits better hockey players than it used to, Harry?”

  I don’t know, in part because I don’t know how good they were in your day. You know that the quality of the players depends a lot on recruiting. I have a feeling you have a superb coach — and I mean as a coach, not just as a recruiter. Your team went into the tournament with 12 losses and 3 ties, not an impressive record, not to mention losing to Quinnipiac 3 times before the NCAAs. Sure looks like the team got better, which has got to be credit to the coach, not the native skills of the players. One of the fun things about college sports (for those of us who don’t grieve every success) is that teams can learn from experience and good coaching. (Same with Harvard and football. The recruits are not as different between H and Y as the records have been the past few years.) The more generous financial aid policies of H and Y in recent years have made athletic recruiting easier, because the gap between need-blind financial aid and athletic scholarships has been reduced for high-need students. That is another factor that may make today’s Yale hockey players, on average, more talented than the ones of your day.

  If I am estimating your vintage accurately, your hockey team classmates would not have been subject to academic index restrictions. On that basis, plus the steady rise in mean A.I. at Yale since then, I suspect that the current hockey players are, in aggregate, better students than the hockey players of your class, though it is impossible to be sure without the granular data. (And it has been awhile since I had all this stuff at my fingertips, so I don’t want to suggest that I really know what happened then much less what is happening now at the level of individual teams.)

• RB
  4/15/2013 9:27 pm

  Harry-too wiped out after a long day to really respond, but just to say that I share your horror about the marathon. Sad and infuriating and hard to believe. An awful day indeed.

• Pioneer13
  4/19/2013 5:02 am

  The Yale hockey screed is offensive on so many levels. Mostly, however, it paints an entire group of young men with the same snide
  and nasty brush, despite your use of “generally” and “occasional exception.”
  What is the source of such animus?

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