Lance Stier: Trimming the Ivy League

The Ivy League is standing on the threshold of what could be a drastic change in Ivy sports as we know them.

If Yale President Richard Levin has his way, cuts in football over the next two years could signal a permanent change in the Ancient Eight's athletic landscape.

"Our request to the athletic directors is that they consider reducing the number of recruited football players," Levin told the Yale Daily News in an article on Feb. 21.

This would be the second such cut in Ivy League football during the past decade. In 1993, the Ancient Eight drastically reduced the average number of football recruits from 50 to 35.

Aside from Levin's proposed cutbacks, the Harvard Crimson reported that same week that Harvard Director of Athletics Robert L. Scalise announced two other plans which will also be considered. One calls for across-the-board reductions in recruits in all sports. The second would "decrease the overall intensity of the athletics experience" for Ancient Eight athletes.

All of these claims come in the wake of the publication of The Game of Life by former Princeton University President William G. Bowen. In the book, Bowen chastises Ivy schools for admitting a significant number of athletes who failed to meet the academic caliber of the regular application pool.

This book has no doubt influenced the recent stirrings in the offices of Ivy League presidents.

And while limiting Ivy football programs' recruiting classes to 35 athletes a year may not seem like much, one must question whether this is merely the beginning of a disturbing trend in which greater cuts are to follow.

After all, wider reductions seem to be en vogue all across Division I athletics.

Just over three weeks ago, the University of Massachusetts announced it would eliminate seven teams from its program. The cuts included the men's tennis and volleyball teams, and they affected 136 athletes.

And Bowling Green, a member of the Mid-Atlantic Confernece, made a similar decision at the end of last month. A debt of $3.4 million added up to the termination of four of the school's teams, including the track program which once-featured Olympic gold-medalist in the 800 meters Dave Wottle.

Opposition to intercollegiate athletics has even spread to the Big 10. As University of Minnesota Regent Michael O'Keefe explained to the Minnesota Daily, "investment options should be in the spirit of the institution," with the implication being that athletics are not in that spirit.

If a bigwig from one of the top athletic conferences in America is committed to academics over sports, one can only imagine what the academic champions of the Ancient Eight might be thinking.

For a while, the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy Group -- as the conference was officially called at its formation in 1954 -- were competitive with big-time athletic programs.

Twenty-three years ago, the Penn men's basketball team lost in the Final Four to Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans.

Today, if any of the Quakers wanted to get to the Big Dance's final weekend, their best bet would be to buy a couple of high-priced tickets and miss a couple of classes.

The gap between the Ivy League and the major sports conferences in America has widened as the Ivies have stuck to their policy of not tendering athletic scholarships. Now, the only allure for a top athlete to come to an Ivy institution is the quality of the overall academic experience.

But getting these athletes to Ivy universities is imperative. Often overlooked is the fact that top athletic talent can attract top academic talent. Students love to cheer for a winning team -- all the better if they can do so while at one of the nation's top institutions.

The love of athletics reaches even the highest ranks of the University of Pennsylvania.

On the eve of the Penn-Princeton matchup, Princeton alum and current Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Walter Licht captured the very essence of Ivy League sports in just a few brief words on Locust Walk.

He told me how he made the trek up the New Jersey Turnpike to his alma-mater to watch the Quakers handily defeat the Tigers.

"I witnessed that slaughter," he told me. "Even for a Princeton grad, it was great."

For the sake of Ivy sports fans everywhere, let's hope that the league presidents too realize just how great the tradition of Ivy sports is.

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