This weekend in the mountains of Vermont, athletic directors from across the Ivy League will meet to make recommendations on an issue which could change the nature of athletics at all Ivy League schools.

The immediate issue at hand is reducing the number of recruited football players from 35 to 25—which some Harvard football players estimate could knock the team to Division III quality within five years.

Ivy League policy makers, however, may not stop at football. Also under consideration, as ordered by Ivy League presidents, is an across-the-board reduction in the number of athletic recruits.

Attempting to limit the population of recruited athletes, however, is nothing new—the Ivy League was actually founded as a football conference designed to set league-wide recruiting policies and academic standards—but the issue has recently been brought to national attention by a book, The Game of Life, which suggests that a radical overhaul of collegiate athletics is needed.

This book, according to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, is a major factor in driving the current discussion.

But Lewis also said presidents and administrators at many Ivy League schools have noticed a disturbing professionalization of collegiate athletics.

“The seasons are too long, there are too many contests, there are too many travel dates, the offseason is too formal and there’s too much training and practicing,” Lewis says of the overall Harvard athletic program. “All of the time and effort that intercollegiate athletes have to spend on their sports result in too often students having to make compromises between their athletic experience and their overall Harvard experience.”

The Problem

At first glance, Lewis’ spacious University Hall office might seem like that of an athletic director—not a dean of the College. Adorning his walls are pictures of Harvard Stadium, the 1989 NCAA champion men’s varsity ice hockey team and the 1998 women’s basketball team, which defeated perennial power Stanford in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

But sitting on a small shelf next to his desk rests a more portentous omen for big-time collegiate athletics—the groundbreaking The Game of Life, co-authored by former Princeton President William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman, which criticizes collegiate sports for what the authors view as their professionalism and commercialization.

Lewis, who is Harvard’s representative on the Ivy League policy committee, outlines two problems he sees with the state of Ivy League athletics—the intensity of the experience and the changed nature of recruiting.

He notes that sports with no traditional season—such as crew—envelope the entire academic year and leave athletes with little time for anything else. In sports with a clear off-season, such as football, Lewis worries that “the off-season is almost as burdensome as the season.”

Because Lewis says he believes the intensity problem gradually builds as one sport sets a precedent for another, the Ivy policy committee refers to the process as “creeping incrementalism.”

Many Harvard athletes, however, vigorously oppose Lewis’ characterization of a problem of over-intensity. These athletes say that athletic participation actually helps their academic performance because of the time-management skills their sport teaches.

“When tennis demands the most time from me, I am more productive in my academic life because it forces me to manage my time more efficiently and effectively,” says Dalibor E. Snyder ’02, a member of the men’s varsity tennis team.