Discriminations

An article in the Harvard Crimson, “How Fair Is Fair Harvard,” wrings its editorial hands over the fact that Harvard is losing the recruited-athlete race to other institutions. (Fair Harvard, written in 1811, is a traditional Harvard song often sung at commencement song. “Recruited Athlete” is the Ivy League term for athletes who are (you will have guessed this) recruited but cannot be given athletic scholarships, which are not allowed in the Ivy League.)

While the most recent edition of the University of Central Florida’s Racial and Gender Report Card (2005) estimates that 20.6 percent of NCAA Division I scholarship athletes are black, Harvard’s recruited athletes—who cannot receive scholarships as per the rules of the Ivy League—do not come close to such a percentage.
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Harvard’s NCAA Self-Study Reports—required of NCAA member institutions once every 10 years as part of a certification process—reveal that from 1994 to 1995, a gap of 4.3 points existed between the percentage of black students (9.7 percent) and recruited black athletes (5.4 percent). The most recent data available, from 2004 to 2005, places the latter figure at 5.5 percent, though the disparity had since shrunk to 2.4 points.

Conversely, whites seem to be overrepresented on Harvard’s teams by margins of 30 percentage points from 1994 to 1995 and 15 points from 2004 to 2005. Much of that decline could be due to the increased popularity of “Other,” an ethnic category that rose dramatically from 110 to 1,126 respondents between 1994 and 2005.

This “underrepresentation” of black athletes at Harvard is, of course, unsettling to diversiphiles, among whom none is more diverse at Harvard than law professor Charles Ogletree.

“It’s disappointing,” says Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a leading civil rights advocate. “Harvard should certainly strive to achieve meaningful diversity in every aspect of its public persona. Given the success of so many other elite institutions, the lower figures are astonishing. It’s a wake-up call.”

According to the article, however, other comparably elite institutions haven’t enjoyed any more “success” at recruiting black athletes than Harvard.

From 2002 to 2005, Yale—arguably Harvard’s most comparable peer institution along with Princeton—featured similar percentages, although Harvard’s minority enrollment figures were all slightly higher across the board. In the ’04-’05 school year, 7.6 percent of all Yale students were black, as opposed to just 5.0 percent of all recruited athletes.

Brown did not enumerate specific percentages, but reported that “6-7 percent” of undergraduates were African-American, compared to “5-6 percent” of student-athletes. Penn’s data, which ranges from 2001 to 2004, shows that 6.9 percent of its students were black, as opposed to 4.9 percent of all student-athletes. Dartmouth declined to delineate between races, but noted that as of 2004, more than 30 percent of its undergraduates were students of color—and yet they represented only 9.8 percent of intercollegiate athletes.

Also instructive, however, is at least one elite institution at the other end of this particular “success” measure: “In 2004-2005, 16.3 percent of Berkeley’s recruited athletes were black, as opposed to 4 percent of its student body.” I wonder if the fact that Berkeley’s percentage of black athletes is over 4 times greater than its proportion of black students could be related to the fact that it can no longer (legally) recruit black students but can recruit, and give scholarships to, athletes, many of whom, no doubt co-incidentally, happen to be black.

ADDENDUM

Several years ago a friend of mine once managed to get a copy of the data Stanford reported to the NCAA. Which athletic team at Stanford do you think had average SAT scores the furthest below the average of the members’ entering classes? No, you’re wrong. It was ... women’s basketball.