Sports Series Was Another Example of Biased Journalism

Your four-part series on Harvard athletics and two-part editorial contain so many errors, innuendoes, distortions, and omissions that I hardly know where to begin responding.

Perhaps it is best to state a few facts, make a few corrections, and point out a few oddities of your reporting and editorializing policies.

First, a few basic facts. Harvard fields 64 teams in 40 sports, more sports than any other Division I institution in the country. There are teams in 19 women's sports and 21 men's sports.

Club teams include everything from aikido to ultimate frisbee. We have huge intramural and recreational athletic programs, involving more than 3,900 students each year. (For some reason there is no mention of these in your stories; one would think that the athletic department simply ran the varsity sports, and that the only athletes at Harvard were intercollegiate.)

There are many recreational classes under the sponsorship of the athletic department, including everything from aerobics to yoga. Our athletic facilities are in most cases in use up to or beyond their capacities, and the department is constantly struggling to find ways to accommodate all those who desire to use them.

Unlike many of our peer institutions, Harvard has not cut any sports under the recent budgetary pressures, and has continued to expand recreational programs. It has, however, cut staff to save money, rather than cutting teams or programs.

Under these circumstances, prioritization and conflicts of perceived priorities are inevitable. Indeed, your first editorial is naive in suggesting that comparable disagreements about resource allocation are rare within academic departments.

Proposals for changes in support level come to the Faculty Committee (which has student members) for discussion, though there have been no changes in the past few years because the program has been operating pretty much at the maximum of what can be done.

The budget of the athletic department is under the control and scrutiny of the dean of the Faculty and his staff, like the budget of every other department of the Faculty. The references to unaccounted-for cash are completely unfounded in anything factual you report and are groundless.

The suggestion that athletics are run the way they are at Harvard in order to generate revenues is an absolute fantasy. Financially it is a losing proposition to maintain a couple of fencing teams, a co-ed boxing program, a women's ice hockey team, a Straus Cup competition.

Nonetheless, Harvard supports all these and has even chosen not to follow most of the Ivy League in cutting freshman football (this was probably the major team story of the fall, but went unmentioned in your reporting).

Athletics are Harvard are run for the benefit of the students, faculty and staff, not the alumni, not the athletic department and certainly not the Treasurer.

The department has done everything possible to keep participation at a high level. If the primary objective were financial maximization, we would have a small number of "revenue-producing" sports and nothing else. This is in fact the pattern at the schools that are known as athletic powerhouses.

Harvard is the extreme point at the other end of the spectrum. Students enjoy and are enriched by their participation in athletics at Harvard and often continue to take pride and interest in our programs after they graduate, but that is vastly different from the suggestion that athletics are maintained because they pay.

We would all prefer to have enough money so that teams (and orchestras, etc.) did not have to do any of their own fundraising, but I am surprised to see The Crimson suggest, as it does in its December 16 editorial, that it would be preferable to kill the men's water polo team than to put it under a fundraising burden.

That is certainly a defensible strategy, one that has been adopted at most schools, and would lead us to have a smaller number of somewhat more well-supported teams. But it of course restricts opportunities for students and I would not have expected The Crimson to imply that it would favor such a move.

Athletes at Harvard are not a separate class of people, in spite of The Crimson's attempt to lump them together, generalize about them and divide them from their fellow students.

I suspect that the students who participate in our intercollegiate athletic programs are more broadly representative of America and the world than those in any other extracurricular or academic program, and almost certainly more diverse and representative than the staff of The Crimson.

Every student admitted to Harvard brings a combination of personal, academic and extracurricular qualities to the community. For whatever reason, Harvard athletes have tended to be very successful in later life, even by the high standards of the general Harvard alumni body.

In this series The Crimson has perfected the journalistic style of asserting a dramatic falsehood and the next day, once the falsehood has set the tone of an entire article, perhaps unapologetically nothing a correction.

Every outrageous example of inequity cited in your story appears to be false, and if these were edited out of your pieces, only a few rather ambiguous anecdotes would remain.

The NCAA champion women's lacrosse team did go to Washington, at Harvard's expense. The softball team does not have to pay for its own uniforms. The purported incident between athletic department officials and the organizers of Evening With Champions (which the athletic department has accommodated for years) did not, according to Cleary and Garber, take place as described (The Crimson does not even cite a first-hand source for its account).

The Crimson's selective and distorted reporting is quite remarkable. The coach pictured opposite the "Coaches...speak of inequities..." headline does no such thing when her words are found buried deep in the article.

Your first editorial states that "With coaches...complaints run thick and angry," but the plurality is utterly unsupported by your own reporting.

I understand that your reporters spoke with several coaches who expressed contentment with the treatment of women's teams, but their views were barely mentioned and did not inform your editorial. There is no mention of the coaches who coach both men's and women's teams.

Finally, while I have seen comparable examples of The Crimson's biased journalism on other issues, rarely have I seen The Crimson's hypocrisy as blatant.

On the sports page of the issue with the story, "Coaches, Students Speak of Inequities for Women's Teams," and the editorial "Level the Fields," I find three stories about men's sports, totaling 42 column inches of text: under a 30-point headline across the top, a lead story of 17 column inches detailing a serious loss by the men's basketball team to Dartmouth, which dropped the team's record to 2-4; a story about a member of the Dartmouth men's basketball team; and a story about Wade Boggs.

Only after all this, in the lower right-hand corner of the page, do I find a story about women's athletics: a mere 12 column inches plus a box about an exciting and important victory by the women's basketball team over Boston University, raising its record to 3-1.

In the four issues in which the athletics series appears decrying Harvard's hiring record for women coaches I count 13 sports articles written by men and one written by a woman.

In the Monday issue running the article entitled "Do All Athletic Teams Get Equal Support?" I find two pages of coverage of what The Crimson elsewhere calls the "high-profile" sports but nary a line of lead on the wrestling match or the men's and women's fencing meets that had taken place over the weekend.

Are such patterns consistent with the high moral ground The Crimson has staked out for itself?

I hope that, the next time you explore an issue that affects the lives of so many of your fellow undergraduates, you will make an attempt that is not so embarrassingly immature, mean, inaccurate and unprofessional. Harry R. Lewis   McKay Professor of Computer Science   Chair, Faculty Committee on Athletic Sports

Editor's Note: The editorial chairs only respond to letters to the editor when they contain inaccuracies. Lewis's letter falls in this category.

First, a few basic facts. The first part of The Crimson's four-part series on athletics detailed the unique pressures and rewards of life as a Harvard student athlete. To my knowledge, no campus publication has devoted as much space to athletes' experiences as The Crimson. We hardly attempt to "divide [athletes] from their fellow students," a wildly overstated charge.

Second, Lewis fails to address our criticism of one of the most disturbing aspects of the athletic department's budget--the fact that he and his committee, who purport to "oversee" the department, do not have access to the budget numbers. Lewis says our references to "unaccounted-for cash" are "groundless." How would he know?

Our reporter, Joe Mathews, spoke with 11 of the 15 members on the committee, and none of them (including Lewis) knew anything specific about budget numbers. Furthermore, in his letter, Lewis completely ignores the $30,000 boondoggle known as Red Top, the heavyweight crew team's Connecticut resort. What does the committee think about this unusual arrangement?

Lewis spends the bulk of his letter arguing that Harvard does not run the Department of Athletics to make money. He points to the existence of more teams than any other Division I school (which The Crimson pointed out in its series) and the high level of participation in Harvard sports.

But our point was not that participation is dwindling, or even that the sum total of Harvard's expenditures on athletics is too small. We were more concerned about the inequalities that coaches and athletes cite in the disbursement of those funds, and about the fact that the exact figures are kept secret.

Lewis says that "[w]e would all prefer to have enough money so that teams (and orchestras, etc.) did not have to do any of their own fundraising." We don't question the need for some fundraising. We simply wonder why the only teams that must fundraise are the ones that don't bring in large amounts of revenue in ticket sales or alumni donations.

And The Crimson doesn't believe that Harvard should cut the men's water polo team. We said, "If Harvard is going to have a men's water polo team, for example, it should ensure that the team doesn't have to spend too much time raising its own funds." Our broader point was that the smaller teams must be protected financially. Never did we say that some of them should be axed.

But Lewis offers no help for these teams in his letter. To the contrary, he seems pleased with the status quo and unconcerned that some teams must make extensive efforts just to guarantee the basics. What about our idea of creating a general "Friends of Harvard Sports" fund to encourage financial gifts that could ease the burden on hard-hit teams?

As for Lewis' other points, we have already corrected the errors we made in reporting. And the Evening With Champions incident seems to be a matter of disagreement, as we reported not the open-and-shut case that Lewis paints it as. And we did cite a "first-hand source" for part of our story. In fact, we cited two. Champions Co-Chair Charles K Lee '93 said Athletic Director William J. Cleary '56 had been insensitive in dealing with the show's producers, and Susie Dangel of WGBH acknowledged that relations between her and the athletics department had been tense.

As for The Crimson's diversity of staff and of coverage, we have admitted problems in these areas many times, and we have taken concrete steps to solve them. Women at The Crimson have held many high positions, including sports editor and president. Can Lewis say that of the Department of Athletics? Or of his own committee?

In the course of his letter, Lewis, a tenured professor, calls us "naive," "mean," "inaccurate," "unprofessional" and "immature." He says we engage in "falsehood" and even "absolute fantasy." Perhaps, on further reflection, he will find that these harsh charges go unsupported by the facts.   John A. Cloud '93   Editorial Chair