Earlier this semester, The Herald conducted a poll of undergraduates to determine their views regarding athletes and athletics on campus. The results were hardly a surprise. Fifty-nine percent of the non-athlete portion of the student body expressed negative views regarding the reservation of admission slots for athletes, and 54 percent of the overall student body viewed the policy disapprovingly. And, rather unsurprisingly, that figure fell to less than 20 percent disapproval among varsity athletes on campus.
These figures do not constitute a revelation. They are merely the reflection of what has been a long-held, if unofficial, opinion on campus. These figures have solidified the already tangible sense of a divide between the vast majority of varsity athletes and the rest of campus. Athletes are seen as privileged, a designation that begins long before they set foot on campus as first-years and continues to dominate their years here following matriculation. Athletes, some claim, are the undeserving benefactors of a recruiting system that reserves admission slots on their behalf. And upon arriving on campus, athletes are granted unique access to academic assistance like tutoring. Athletes, in short, are granted unfair benefits.
I would like to suggest that this simply does not capture the entire picture.
The greatest perceived injustice seems to dwell in the very admission of these athletes. The perception is, in its simplest terms, that the University is sacrificing academic achievements in lieu of athletic ones. And in a sense, the University is engaging in a trade off, but any difference in academic achievement is far less drastic than the “dumb jock” stereotype. In fact, during the final years of Ruth Simmons’ presidency, the University instituted new, more stringent academic achievement requirements for potential recruits. In that sense, arguments that athletes are not deserving of a place in the classroom alongside their peers are becoming less and less true.
However, there are subtler and more pernicious implications of animosity toward athletes. An indictment of recruiting grounded in a perceived lack of academic rigor holds, at its core, that admission of recruits inherently diminishes the value of Brown’s name. In short, these attempts to diversify the student body will make a Brown degree less valuable. Beyond the increasingly irrelevant nature of these critiques, the assertion that diversification of a student body detracts from the value of the whole seems entirely counterintuitive to some core sense of the University’s beliefs.
And we cannot disregard the seeming connection between the criticism of athletic recruiting and the denouncement of a more abstract belief in the power of open-mindedness, social literacy and diversification that this University’s name often engenders. Because with this as a jumping-off point, it is not too far a step to begin questioning the validity of other similarly minded attempts at diversification — admission slots for international students comes to mind.
Ultimately, there are two simple solutions to the question of recruitment. On the one hand, we could abolish recruiting altogether and relegate athletic achievement to a simple mention alongside other extracurricular activities in an application. However, I feel that this sort of change would fan the fires in the college admission industry. It would encourage additional gaming of the admission system and potentially reward students for stuffing and then over-stuffing their resumes with a host of mostly meaningless titles and activities.
Instead of leveling the playing field in that manner, I believe an expansion of recruiting itself offers a better solution to the problem. In essence, we should open up reserved slots to exceptionally talented individuals beyond the confines of the court or the playing field. A school’s capacity to offer a more holistic education would be benefited greatly if it were to try and promise places to especially talented thespians, musicians, artists, writers, etc.
This change would incentivize a deeper and more honest investment in a given talent or activity by prospective students. This would, in part, cure some of the ailments of the current college admission system that have been so lambasted recently — former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz’s writings immediately spring to mind. And it would hopefully usher in a more nuanced sense of perspective on campus — one that works in concert with efforts to expand socioeconomic and racial diversity to thus capture a more varied set of experiences in our student body.
The current college admission system is a decidedly imperfect one. But I do not feel that athletic recruiting is the most egregious contributor to its flaws. Rather, I believe that an expanded system of recruiting would go a long way toward solving some of the issues inherent in our current admission process. It would encourage a more meaningful engagement with one’s passions and be a step away from the unfortunate obsession with quantity over quality that college applicants display with their extracurricular lists.
Contrary to the myth of well- roundedness, I believe that it serves both schools and students best to have a more eclectic mix of bodies gifted at a smaller subset of things. We should expand recruiting and reward the extraordinary athlete, artist and poet equally. We should not shy away from rewarding talented individuals who have simultaneously demonstrated the necessary academic prowess to succeed in a given institution. We should not decry recruiting. We should applaud it.
Sean Blake ’17 likes knowing that there are incredibly talented people around him. He can be reached at
sean_blake@brown.edu.
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