Athletics on campus

This summer, the presidents of all eight Ivy League schools will meet to discuss athletics, and to adjust the policy now known as the seven-week moratorium. Rather than requiring a fixed number of weeks off each year, the presidents appear ready to move to a plan that would put a new cap on the number of days teams can practice each week in the off-season.

We agree with President Tilghman's assessment that there is a potentially troubling trend in Ivy League athletics. The level of competition in Division I as a whole is increasing every year. If they are to keep pace with the changes taking place around them, Ivy schools must increase the campus emphasis on athletics. Year-round training regimes that limit the time and energy many athletes have available for other pursuits are becoming more and more common.

Any student activity, pursued to the fullest, can present a trade-off with academics, as 'Prince' editors who have seen their grades suffer will readily attest. But for a complex cluster of reasons, athletics is different from other extracurriculars. The numbers show that varsity athletes, as a group, underperform academically relative to other students who enter Princeton with equivalent high school records. The recruiting priority for athletics is unlike that accorded other student activities, and once students arrive on campus varsity teams play a unique role in social life. Many undergraduates who play varsity sports for Princeton describe themselves as athletes first, and students second.

We only know the Princeton of today, and it's hard for us, immersed in this environment, to gain perspective on it. We aren't ready to condemn the current role of athletics on campus. On the other hand, we think experiences at other schools show that while college sports are often a positive force for campuses in general and student athletes in particular, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

The Ivy League ideal of the scholar-athlete strikes us as a good one. It understands athletics as enriching and reinforcing, rather than undermining, the academic component of a college education. Different institutions have different values, and as the rest of Division I evolves toward an increasingly professionalized vision of college sports, it is well in order for Princeton and the other Ivies to defend the balance of athletics and academics they feel is most appropriate. If other schools in Division I have gotten their priorities wrong, a division title may not be the appropriate metric for the success of Ivy teams.

The Ivy vision of sports as part of a larger college experience is attractive to many possible recruits, and will become ever more so as professionalization continues throughout the rest of Division I. Appealing to students who want to play a sport while going to college (and not the other way around) will benefit the campus as a whole.

By opposing the trend of ever-increasing athletic demands on varsity athletes, President Tilghman is helping to ensure that playing varsity sports can remain a part of a balanced and varied college experience in the Ivy League. We're glad the seven-week moratorium, a policy even its backers acknowledge to be a blunt instrument, will be modified. At the same time, we think a further increase in the intensity of athletics would be corrosive to the Ivy League's institutional mission, and we are happy to see the Ivy presidents doing something about the trend. — The Daily Princetonian Opinion Board