Someone needs to be in charge of overseeing the 36 Division I varsity sports, 29 club sports and numerous intramural programs at Dartmouth. This task falls to Athletic Director Josie Harper, who knows that managing athletics at an Ivy League school like Dartmouth is no small feat.
"Division I athletics are quite a challenge these days," Harper said in her office on an overcast Friday afternoon. "We're still the only league without scholarships, and I'd say we're the league with the highest academic criteria."
Despite these challenges, Harper gave only one response when asked about her basic obligations as AD: "Managing expectations of our alumni, of our faculty and of our students."
"Sometimes there is a disconnect," she said. "My job that I need to do more work on is [building] a more open line of communication, particularly with our faculty."
A graduate of West Chester University in West Chester, Pa., Harper was no stranger to Dartmouth when she accepted the AD position in June 2002. She was the head coach of the women's lacrosse team from 1981 to 1992, winning Ivy League championships in 1986 and 1987. Her squads also garnered an ECAC championship in 1988 and an NCAA tournament berth in 1983.
She has been inducted into four athletic halls of fame, including the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2006. After coaching, she served as Dartmouth's associate athletic director from 1992 to 2002, where she was responsible for the intercollegiate athletic programs.
Harper credits her extensive coaching background for helping her get through tough times. "My resiliency comes from my coaching and my playing," she said. "If you have a 16 game schedule in lacrosse and you lose the first four, what are you going to do? You're going to try to figure out how to win, and you're going to examine what you did right and what didn't do so well. You always figure out another game plan."
She added, "I'm a different kind of coach these days."
Under her tenure, there have been a number of changes with the athletic program, but Harper highlights the construction of new facilities and the hiring of new coaches as her biggest accomplishments.
In addition to the improvements to Memorial Field and the new Floren Varsity House, Harper pointed to the new fitness center as the realization of years of students "screaming" for a new workout facility. She also called the soccer complex a deserving place for two premier soccer teams that had "been playing on a practice field for five years."
Harper labeled the stable of Dartmouth varsity coaches as "one of strongest coaching staffs we have ever had here, with particular attention to the men's front porch sports [football and basketball]."
She argues that if Dartmouth's coaches, without the help of scholarship and the high academic expectations, can recruit talented students and win then those same coaches could do wonders in the Division I scholarship program. "If I was at another Division I scholarship program, I'd snatch our coaches up in a minute."
Harper found herself managing two controversial situations in the Fall 2006 term, where her reactions made her the target of widespread criticism.
With regard to the football brawl with Holy Cross at Homecoming, Harper was concerned that the football team's growing positive reputation under head coach Buddy Teevens could have been irreversibly damaged by the brawl.
"It lasted, when they finally got down to it, less than two minutes, despite people wanting to say it was 10 minutes. Two minutes," she emphasized. "Bad judgment in two minutes can change your life, so [I told the team] let's look at this as a learning experience."
"There were a lot of people that wanted them hung out to dry, mostly people who were not here and did not see the confrontation," she said about the lack of harsher or more individualized punishments. "It wouldn't be fair to hold our kids up to make a statement."
More recently, Harper has been under fire for her comments regarding the scheduling the University of North Dakota men's hockey team in the annual Ledyard National Bank Classic in December 2006. She wrote in the Nov. 21 issue of The Dartmouth that she anticipated that the match up with the Fighting Sioux would "offend and hurt people in the community."
She added in the letter that "UND's position is offensive and wrong", and regretted that the athletic department did not consider "the team's nickname and symbol" when UND was scheduled two years prior to the tournament.
"My personal opinion, why I wrote to The D, is that I think that if characterization of a race and anything is hurtful to a group of people, no matter what, then we should really not do it. You just try to be respectful of somebody's feelings." she said during the interview.
Harper said she is not upset with the number of the e-mails she has received, but she is more troubled that these letters have become overtly offensive and attempted to warp her comments into something other than her original intent.
"I saw part of our community and some of our students upset. We never said we apologize that we invited North Dakota and that they are coming. We said they are coming and some of you are going to be upset by it, and my view is that it's wrong -- end of story."
When asked if she would amend anything from her original statement, Harper said she would have made it clear that she was speaking only to Dartmouth. "I might have said a hundred times before I started after I wrote the note to The D 'I would like to address our community.'"
While much of the backlash from mascot debate has come from former and current students, Harper believes she has an obligation to Dartmouth's passionate alumni and student body, especially the students who advocate and support the Dartmouth experience.
"The students are the best salespeople," Harper said. "I owe it to our students to give them the best experience possible, whether it's a varsity sport or whether it's through an intramural or club program."
