Last August, alumni went to their mailboxesto find an issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine featuring an interview with Richard "Dick" Jaeger '59, retiring after 13 years as athletic director.
To anyone aware of the controversy about Ivy athletics since the release of James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen's "The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values," the Jaeger interview had an unreal quality. It was as though Rip Van Winkle had been awakened and asked to say a few words about Ivy League football.
The point of the Shulman-Bowen book is that in the current atmosphere of "professionalized" college sports, the Ivies haven't been acting much differently than openly-acknowledged sports factories like Nebraska or UNLV. The difference is this: where UNLV might be prone to lure "blue chip" recruits with gold chains and SUVs, the Ivies do it by offering recruits one of the most prized commodities in American society: a slot in an Ivy League entering class.
The name of this game is coaches' "set asides," ranked lists of names sent over to the admissions office by varsity sports coaches. At Princeton, the percentage of "set asides" in recent years has been running between 21-24 percent -- nearly one place in four in Princeton's entering class has been reserved for individuals admitted on the basis of physical skills rather than intellectual ability.
The grounds on which Swarthmore recently abolished football were that so great a dilution of the freshman class was doing perceptible damage at a top liberal arts college. Williams and Amherst have recently agreed to set a sharp limit on set asides. In the Ivy League, the first tentative steps have been taken toward decreasing football set-asides from 35 to 25 per school.
This is the context in which some readers found it depressing to listen to Mr. Jaeger going on with cheery obliviousness about how Dartmouth's problems could be solved if the administration would "just give coaches one extra wildcard with admissions." It is also the context in which I wrote Mr. Jaeger the following letter. Several classmates have suggested that it might be of interest to the Dartmouth community.
Dear Mr. Jaeger:
I was disheartened beyond the telling by your interview in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
The idea that "one extra wildcard for coaches" would be your single wish for Dartmouth shows that a mentality that has already done serious damage to the Ivy League is more stubbornly entrenched at Dartmouth than one knew.
Bill Bowen's book seems to have had hardly any impact in Hanover. In fact, you're thinking about the "set aside" issue wrong. Given the constraints of the academic index -- which in my view should be made much more stringent, not less -- Dartmouth would benefit from a reduction of set-asides in comparison to the Big Three. It would mean 30 fewer players available to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, all of whom would be likely to choose Dartmouth over any of the other Ivies.
If the number could ever be reduced to zero, Dartmouth would benefit in a different way: with teams made up simply of students who applied to and were accepted at the College -- with no interference from coaches -- the more physically robust and athletically gifted type is almost sure to choose Dartmouth over any of the Big Three.
If I remember my own freshman Green Book at Dartmouth correctly, something like 55 percent of my entire class had been captains of at least one varsity team in high school. This was before the professionalization of Ivy sports had set in, but I think the forces drawing such students to Hanover -- our reputation as an "outdoor" school, etc. -- remain in play.
Dartmouth is in a bad way. The perspective revealed in your Alumni Magazine interview explains why we have always been intellectually second rate in relation to the top Ivies. With a focus on "one extra wildcard for coaches" and the utter failure of Jim Wright's attempt to abolish frats, we are going downhill at an accelerated rate.
The only thing that will save Dartmouth is a thorough housecleaning: a new president, one with the energy and vision to move the College upwards in the Ivy League as Yale is moving down; dismantling the Greek system and thus dissuading the mediocre applicants the frats so overwhelmingly attract to Dartmouth; an athletic director who will work for the complete elimination of athletic set asides; abolition of the bizarre "Dartmouth plan" and institution of the two-semester system that has always worked successfully at Harvard and the other Ivies; and a person-by-person elimination of the "old" Dartmouth mentality from the higher administration.
I don't expect any of this to happen. I expect to go to my grave with Dartmouth still holding on as the slightly dimwitted cousin of the top Ivies. But it is still somehow discouraging to learn that someone who has been working in Dartmouth admissions and athletics for nearly 40 years is going into retirement with no change whatever in a mentality that has done great damage to the College.
Sincerely yours,
William C. Dowling
