NAS misconstrues Bowdoin’s athletic divide

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FOr 'cac and country

NAS misconstrues Bowdoin’s athletic divide

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

April 12, 2013

The NAS report has garnered incredible notoriety beyond our campus. Real Clear Politics compared “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” to William Buckley Jr.’s seminal “God and Man at Yale,” and Rush Limbaugh knocked Bowdoin for our lack of American history courses. Before any public figure comments on the NAS’s arguments about our sports culture, it is only right to clear up a few of its ideas.

Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, authors of the report, analyzed Bowdoin athletics based largely on the paradigm provided in William Bowen and James Shulman’s 2001 publication titled “The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values.” According to the report, it provides “a scrupulous examination” particularly on “selective institutions without big-time programs.”

When it comes to athletes, schools like Bowdoin stray from their mission statements, the authors of the report argue. The report contends that athletes create a divide in and out of the classroom that prevents the College from fulfilling the common good.

The report backs up this claim through statistics and quotes by President Barry Mills, his predecessor Kenneth Sills, and numerous professors. If the report were a research assignment, it might receive a “Bowdoin B”—strictly for its use of evidence.

But, the report often cites outdated figures: in the Class of 1999, “75 percent of football, men’s basketball and men’s ice hockey athletes scored an average of 150 points lower on their SATs than their counterparts.” So yes, athletes scored lower on their SATs, but that was in 1999, before the current president or director of admissions were at Bowdoin. Moreover, the SAT scores that the report relies on are not a good barometer of academic performance or ability. It is an aptitude test and is hardly a guarantee for success at any college or university in America. After all, the College hasn’t required that students submit SAT scores in their application since before 1969.

Today, 14 years after the 1999 statistics the report cites—and thanks to efforts by the College’s administrators—the same discrepancies between student-athletes and students hardly exist in the classroom. An article in last week’s Orient provides the most recent data.

According to President Mills in February, the cumulative GPA of student-athletes was 3.22 while the all-student cumulative was 3.25. Although the College has not officially released these records since 2005, these figures still demonstrate how slight the difference between students and student-athletes is in the classroom.

Perhaps the most striking argument made in the report is that student-athletes create a division within the school. It took a great deal of insight for a Bowdoin outsider to discern that the social scene often separates into those who play sports and those who do not. What this outsider was unaware of, however, is the extent to which this trend exists and persists.

The report looks to personal experiences to support the claim and once again cites decade-old pieces of information.

The writers of the report cite a 2001 Orient article in which a student complains that, “sports teams and social houses are the two main players that create cliques."This statement is fair and certainly applies somewhat today, but not to the extent to which the report suggests. The Office of Residential Life has done its best to prevent social houses and student-athletes from becoming a divisive source in Bowdoin’s social scene. Over the last 14 years, College Houses (as ResLife now insists they be called) have become more diverse, therefore lending the space to numerous and different social circles on campus.

Also, the social divisions that exist are more visible than palpable. Everyone on campus is aware of the hockey table at Moulton, athlete row in Thorne, and the notorious weekend parties at Crack House. But these images of student-athlete and student divisions are funnier than they are serious. The common late-night weekend question, “Is Crack happening?” has become almost comical, and numerous people joke about the immaturity of a team having its own table or showing off its green Gatorade squirt bottles during class. Make no mistake, these jokes aren’t targeted at student-athletes but rather shared by student-athletes and those who don’t play sports.

First-year student-athletes are exposed to an immediate friend group upon their arrival because they share at least one common interest with their teammates. But by senior year, many athletes expand their social circles, and less frequently sit on athlete row or go out exclusively with their teammates.

So to answer the NAS reports’ findings, yes, these divisions do occur. But at what cost? Certainly not academic and hardly social. We can draw divisions between artists and non-artists, science and humanities students, or rich and poor students. We can splice and dice our student body in any way we want, and try to point at the division between the different parts.

But the division between student-athletes and those who aren’t on teams is hardly permanent, as the report seems to suggest. Rather, the culture of Bowdoin continues to change.

Just as fraternities filled with white males who bussed in girls every weekend once ruled Bowdoin’s social life, an increasingly diverse student body is erasing the line dividing student-athletes and students. And thanks to that diversity, the existence of this division will one day be just a fleeting thought.

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