If It Bleeds, It Leads

The New York Times, captivated by the scent of blood, has suddenly taken an interest in Ivy League athletics. The paper-of-record’s customarily New York-centric sports pages do not usually pay the conference too much heed—even a “homer,” after all, would have a hard time scaring up affection for perennial cellar-dweller Columbia.

But just as the extracurricular activities of a certain state official have proven too scintillating for the front pages to ignore, the Times believes it has found a similarly sordid narrative to plant on the back pages. Thus came the paper’s report last Tuesday that the former jewel of Harvard’s “highly regarded recruiting class,” six-foot-ten Nigerian-born center Frank Ben-Eze, has reneged on his commitment to don Crimson next fall, perhaps in light of the negative attention brought by the Times’ exposure of possible recruiting violations by coach Tommy Amaker.

The about-face should work out alright for Ben-Eze, whose high-school coach told the Times that the big man had already received calls last week from Boston College, Rutgers University, and the Universities of Cincinnati, Connecticut, and Pittsburgh. It seemed uncertain, anyway, whether Ben-Eze would have managed to raise his ‘Academic Index’ score above the minimum required to compete in the Ivy League in time for the March deadline on admissions decisions.

The news that Ben-Eze is no longer Cambridge-bound reminded me of a moment late last year when I found myself hearing of the plight faced by a very different subset of foreign-born students in the quest for a Harvard education.

In an outdoor campus café within spitting distance of “the security fence”—the wall constructed to separate (sometimes disputed) Israeli land from the territory of the West Bank—a dean of East Jerusalem’s most prominent university told me that three Harvard students had visited the West Bank last summer on behalf of Harvard’s admissions office.

The hope and angst juxtaposed on the wall’s face (where “Mr. Bush tear down this wall” stood spray-painted only a few panels over from “Zionism = Nazism”) underlined the story I heard from the dean: local students, aspiring to education’s holy grail, were soon discouraged by the unfamiliar exams demanded by the application process—another high wall that blocked their escape route in education.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for these students, as it seems unlikely that Kaplan will open a branch in Ramallah anytime soon. While I expect that Harvard’s international admissions standards take into account their hardship—they stop short of setting a minimum required score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, for instance—qualified applicants from troubled environments cannot hope for anything resembling the leniency shown to Ben-Eze, who apparently was guaranteed admission so long as he could raise his ‘Academic Index’ to the bare minimum tolerated by Ivy League bylaws. I couldn’t tell you if the New York Times makes it to Nablus in hard copy, but at Web cafés around the world, aspiring scholars learned that Harvard will compromise for students who show enough promise—at basketball.

It is hard to deny that the school’s resources could be better spent reaching out to those academically capable students striving to gain an education in disadvantaged areas—whether in the West Bank or East Cleveland.

The choice we face is not exactly “either-or,” but when it comes down to it, the college’s overall recruiting practices should project our belief in the power of education to change the world, not merely in the power of rebounding to change a game. The school has taken a great step in this direction with the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, and the accompanying academic recruiting push among America’s less affluent communities. But a college whose freshman class still draws more members from Andover than from most states has plenty of work left to do.

Every effort that Harvard devotes to that prospect seeking to concentrate in basketball—with a secondary in gut cores—could be better spent pursuing world-changing talent instead, wherever it may be found.

And so while I wish Ben-Eze great success on the court as an Eagle or a Huskie or a Bearcat, I for one will not be upset when the national sports pages no longer bleed Crimson.







Max J. Kornblith ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House.