“The Game is Changing”
Posted on March 7th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »
On the eve of a big game, the New York Times profiles the changing level of the Yale and Harvard basketball programs.
Before Amaker’s arrival, in 2007, Harvard never won an Ivy League championship. Now, the Crimson have won or shared the last three titles. This season, for the first time since official Ivy League play began, in 1956-57, Harvard swept the season series with Penn and Princeton, something Yale accomplished last season, also for the first time.
The article, by Seth Berkman, focuses on the changing style of play—no longer is Ivy League basketball a bunch of white guys passing the ball around until someone “chucks up” a three. (Hello, Chris Dudley! Which is slightly unfair, as Chris Dudley really couldn’t shoot threes, or free throws, but still…)
I wish it had looked a bit more about why the Ivy League schools—Harvard was first, and Yale appears to have followed suit—have ramped up their basketball programs to such a degree.
Is it just a coincidence that, a year or so after Tommy Amaker arrives and starts recruiting players Harvard would never previously have gone after, the university experiences its biggest academic scandal in decades, if not ever—in a class heavily stocked with athletes?
Was it inevitable that Ivy League schools would start getting serious about athletics, or was there a conscious choice at Harvard, which started an athletic arms race? And how are these newly big-time programs changing the identity and the priorities of these universities?
You know, given the focus on entrepreneurship, extracurriculars and athletics promoted at Ivy League universities these days….does anyone really give a damn about what happens in class?
I know I sound like a curmudgeon for saying so, and some people might argue that this is a reasonable response to external circumstances, but it does seem that university priorities are changing, and while much may be gained, something seems to be lost in the hustle.
22 Responses
3/7/2024 12:51 pm
Larry is to blame. who else but. if he hadn’t ramped up financial aid, HFAI, so that it became in many cases the equivalent of athletic scholarships, a lot of these kids wouldn’t be at Harvard
3/7/2024 4:10 pm
This really doesn’t seem like much of an expose - caught on video &cetera.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/04/3361911/harvard-president-faust-fossil-fuel/#
3/7/2024 11:29 pm
Observer’s comment is bigger than it seems. The change to what happens in classroom has more to do with the financial aid policy than with the record of the basketball team. Harvard, Yale, and the other Ivies are giving opportunities to many more socioeconomically students who would not have attended these schools in the past. They are bright, ambitious, and, having not grown up in book infested homes, less inclined to walk into the freshman year thinking that reading poetry and philosophy is the highest form of civilization. It is the responsibility of us who are teaching them to justify the life of the mind. It is not self-evident. The faculty is not changing the way it teaches as rapidly as the student body has changed in its composition.
As for basketball, the two classiest coaches in basketball beat Yale tonight. The accompanying NYT story about Harvard’s own Coach K puts the faculty to shame — how many students at H or Y have the opportunity for that kind of mentorship from their academic advisors? And the Yale student body followed Richard’s cue tonight, shouting “cheater” at Kyle Casey during tonight’s rout.
3/8/2024 10:37 am
“Is it just a coincidence that, a year or so after Tommy Amaker arrives and starts recruiting players Harvard would never previously have gone after, the university experiences its biggest academic scandal in decades, if not ever—in a class heavily stocked with athletes?”
The answer to this question is very obviously yes.
There are tons of birds around and some of them are changing their ways and pulling muscles and might be out if breath. They are not all canaries and your nose may be playing tricks on you. Keep working the seams.
3/8/2024 10:38 am
Of not *if
3/9/2024 5:33 pm
Harry,
But isn’t part of the point of the financial aid policy to bring in more athletes?
That way you can say you’re offering them financial aid and not athletic scholarships, which the Ivy League does not allow, correct?
As for Yalies shouting “cheater” at Kylie Casey…well, I wouldn’t shout that, but from what one can tell, it does appear to be factually correct, and since he withdrew from Harvard as a financial stratagem to retain his athletic eligibility, it seems within the parameters of fairness in modern heckling to point out why he was forced to do so.
Looked at another way, Yalies still think cheating matters, and Harvard has a player on the court who cheated and then got careful advice on how to not let that affect his ability to play basketball for Harvard.
It seems to me that you are tougher on the catcalling than on the cheating.
3/9/2024 6:49 pm
I don’t ever remember anyone saying that athletics was a REASON for the improved financial aid policies that several Ivies have adopted. I would love to see your evidence for that. Even by your standards of cynicism, it is pretty cynical to think that the Ivies that have, at significant cost, upped their recruitment and financial aid for low income students (in the midst of a national conversation about how few low income students attended these institutions) did it in ORDER to get better athletes. It is true that the change has lowered the gap that used to exist between merit-based and need-based scholarships. That is good for these schools academically, by the way — there is less reason now than there used to be for low-income students to accept academic merit scholarships that non-Ivies offer (the A.B. Dukes, for example) rather than need-based scholarships to the Ivies.
I plead guilty to being tougher on the professor and the administration in the Gov 1310 case than on the students. When there was a cheating scandal in the course of a similarly incompetent Dartmouth professor back in 2000, Dartmouth dropped all charges against the students and announced that there was no way to assign culpability fairly. It is a nice question, which I will leave to another day, why Harvard did not do the same.
As for the shouting, I know how much you care about fans staying classy. It’s possible the same thing might have happened at Harvard if all the roles were reversed; I’d like to think not. But I also mentioned it because it speaks to your broader allegation, that these institutions are changing, and not for the better. Would Yale students have done that in your day? So why do they do it now? It’s not because the quality of hoops has improved.
3/9/2024 7:01 pm
I agree, not a classy move, Harry. But I’m not sure that the institutions are sending the point that classy behavior means anything. I don’t know that classy behavior and big-time basketball are compatible—the NCAA certainly doesn’t provide a lot of evidence for that—and Harvard has chosen big-time basketball.
I mean, what lesson are Yale and Harvard students supposed to take from Casey being on the court? That if you know how to work the system, you can cheat and get away with it and come back and all is automatically forgiven? How do you expect the kids to stay classy when the institution that’s supposed to teach them isn’t?
If I said that the expanded recruitment of athletes was the reason for expanded financial aid policies—which, looking at my comment, I did in part—that is too strong. But is certainly is a consequence. I don’t think it’s cynical to point that out, just honest.
3/9/2024 8:13 pm
Yes, that is what you said. Your corrected statement is true, and many have observed it, — but it doesn’t take your argument anywhere.
So in your justice system, these students would have been tossed permanently? And Teddy Kennedy too, whose malfeasance was worse? I don’t think Harvard is much different from most colleges — the idea us that when you are 19 or 20, in the case of all but the most heinous offenses, you can learn something from your mistakes and reclaim your role in society.
3/9/2024 11:17 pm
Richard —
I was going to say what Harry already said. Having served on the Administrative Board at Harvard, I can tell you, it feels terrible when we have to require students to withdraw for a year for violating our academic rules. I note that, as far as I can tell, most other institutions have far more lenient policies regarding these issues. But one redeeming feature — that I have talked about with students who have gone through it — is that Harvard welcomes you back. If you made a mistake, it’s not the end — life goes on, and we aim to support you when you return.
So to go back to your question:
“I mean, what lesson are Yale and Harvard students supposed to take from Casey being on the court? That if you know how to work the system, you can cheat and get away with it and come back and all is automatically forgiven?”
For your second sentence, I don’t see how a student withdrawing for a year (even if they pre-empted being required to by starting the process themselves) is “getting away with it”. As for what students are supposed to learn from Casey being on the court, how about you should not let a mistake define your life. You come back, hopefully wiser, and continue to strive to be the best you can be.
Perhaps more generally students (or blog authors) should be learning to be a bit less judgmental and a bit more forgiving. That’s something I quickly learned from my time on the Ad Board.
3/9/2024 11:29 pm
(I feel the need to point out that my above comment should be taken in general terms — I didn’t mean to follow Richard in presuming Casey’s guilt. I certainly don’t know the specifics of Casey’s case — perhaps he didn’t do anything wrong at all — and as Harry points out the background to the whole situation leaves a lot of questions as to how the Gov 1310 cases should have been handled regardless. But even if you start from the assumption that he cheated, of course Harvard should welcome him back — as we do with all the others who return, with the hope that they move forward and fulfill their potential.)
3/10/2024 8:07 am
Michael: “Getting away with it” means returning to Harvard with no impact on your athletic career, and that is the relevant standard of big-time basketball programs.
To both Michael and Harry, my point is this: If you want a big-time basketball program, with de facto scholarships and the inevitable lowering of academic standards that come from recruiting star athletes, you must accept the almost-inevitable cultural consequences of that. Those include academic corruption and fans treating players like commodities, as big-time basketball programs do. It is a bit of Harvard arrogance to say, well, we are the one place that can prioritize basketball at this level, recruit at this level, play at this level—and yet maintain the standards of academics and civility which our university professes to prioritize.
Again: I don’t love students yelling “cheater” at a basketball player, despite the apparent truth of it. (Somewhat murky, I’ll grant.)
But I do think it’s an understandable, if jejune, response to the sense that Harvard has changed the rules by which Ivy League sports have traditionally been played, and along with those changes comes the NCAA, ESPN-inspired model of fandom. It would be a great thing if Harvard and Yale could encourage students to appreciate big-time sports without acting like big-time jerks. But to do that, they must first concede that the nature of their athletics programs is changing, and no one seems to want to do that because it conflicts with the image of the Ivy League university. This is a classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
3/10/2024 8:53 am
You did not answer my question about Teddy Kennedy. What price should he have paid, beyond what he did, for cheating at Harvard? Or would you have a special system of justice just for athletes? What standard of punishment would you want your son held to?
You came to your conclusion ahead of time, you have a mean-spirited animus against a couple of Harvard students, and you are straining logic to use the latter as evidence of the former.
I think we actually agree about some of our worries about the university. Dignity, honor, faithfulness — these are values in decline. But basketball is not the evidence. It’s Andrei Shleifer defrauding the government and getting away with it. It’s Larry Summers calling a couple of alumni assholes and getting away with it. It’s Michael Porter calling Ghaddafi’s Libya a democracy, for a price, and getting away with it. It’s Buddy Fletcher getting a special deal … well, maybe he is not going to get away with it. And yes, it’s the Gov 1310 professor turning his course into a campus wide joke and getting away with it, at great cost to lots of students. Students are smart enough to know that the local conversation about honor codes and so on doesn’t actually line up with the way the adults are behaving. But the athletic programs at both Harvard and Yale are run more honorably than some other parts of the university, not less.
3/10/2024 9:08 am
Harry-I have to answer this quickly as I’m about to lead a panel discussion with Mohamed El-Erian and have to run do that…but first, I hope I’m not mean-spirited, and second, I strongly reject the idea that I have an animus against any students. I don’t know word one about Kyle Casey-I freely admit that—and I absolutely wish him well. I imagine he’s been through a tough situation and it seems like he’s handled it with poise. Good on him.
And yes, I think we agree more than we disagree. I just don’t see the athletic issues as separate from all the other ones you mention; they are all part of a university that wants more power, more fame, more money-even at the expense of its most deeply cherished values.
And yes, the Gov 1301 prof is partly to blame here. But why do you think there were so many athletes taking that class anyway? As we used to say when I was a student, they needed a gut. They knew it was supposed to be an incredibly easy class—the kind you find a lot of athletes taking—and with their rigorous training and playing schedules, that’s what they were looking for. The problem came when it turned out to be not as easy as they’d expected.
So blame the professor if you want, but that strikes me as only part of the picture.
3/10/2024 9:08 am
Apologies for being rushed, by the way!
3/10/2024 10:28 am
You are flailing. Guts are another subject. They have been around since forever, used to be called “bow-wows” a hundred years ago, and never go out of style; they have nothing to do with Harvard basketball. Students take them when their schedule is heavy, with overly demanding courses like mine, with mounting a mainstage production, with athletic competition. Always have. If students shouldn’t be taking these courses, the university shouldn’t be offering them. I personally am of two minds about that. I wouldn’t mind more quality control on our courses — and some guts are embarrassingly bad as well as being easy, while some are actually good courses even though the work is rather optional, and I wouldn’t want those two cases treated the same. And then there is the problem that if someone regulated how easy other professors’ courses could be, well then they would have to regulate how hard mine could be, which I would not enjoy; the availability of one makes possible the other. Anyway, that story is as old as the hills, and has nothing to do with the decline of civilization you are citing because of Harvard’s basketball success (not to mention Yale’s hockey success!).
3/10/2024 1:34 pm
leading a panel discussion with El-Erian. Hope he is not going to be speaking about anything to do with moral values.
3/11/2024 2:40 am
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-11/harvard-basketball-gets-winning-way-from-new-england-prep-school.html
3/12/2023 6:17 am
All VERY well said, Harry. And I think MM’s point is important: whatever criticisms can be leveled at the College about the Gov class, none of them involves letting students “get away with” cheating. For a Harvard student, being sent away for a year is an incredibly severe punishment, one they think it’s impossible to recover from. —When they do recover, they have learned something very important and new.
3/14/2014 6:03 am
Observer—and Harry—I’d just like to point out this quote from the piece you recommend:
—“Harvard is becoming like other schools,” said Steven Goodman, an educational consultant in Washington who helps students gain admission to elite colleges and frequently works with student athletes. “It’s using its market position to attract not only the best academic students, but the best athletes as well.”—
Note the distinction he makes. It is, again, a bit of Harvard arrogance to think that you can have the best athletes and the best academic students without affecting the overall academic atmosphere.
Harry, I don’t think I’m flailing, and frankly, the reverse. I’m not making a huff about the existence of guts, which certainly existed when I was at Yale and I expect still do. It’s even possible that I took a couple of them. (Not all one’s courses can be equally hard.)
My point was that it’s not a coincidence that this gut was chock full of athletes, many of them apparently at a level Harvard did not once attract/recruit, and that there was a cheating scandal.
My point is simply this: High-powered athletic programs inevitably bring academic degradation. If you can find one university where that is not the case, I’d like to know. (Duke, maybe? Oh, wait….)
Harvardians will confidently argue for Harvard exceptionalism—recent history notwithstanding.
3/14/2014 6:06 am
Or, as Steven Goodman says, above: “Harvard is becoming like other schools.”
3/14/2014 10:30 am
That is actually a line I use regularly. It’s why we have gotten or are getting things we don’t need—a women’s center, a student center, an honor code, and so on. Today’s Globe has an editorial suggesting we are behind the times in not having a multicultural student center. I don’t get the logic of doing things just because every place else does. Sometimes our decision to be different had some thought behind it.
I just don’t know why having a bad basketball team should be a point of pride in our distinctiveness. Anyway, we are just trying to keep up with Yale, which got a lot farther in hockey last year than Harvard ever will in basketball (men’s in both cases).