Bill Greene/The Boston Globe, via Associated Press
Kyle Casey, left, after the Crimson were drawn against Vanderbilt in the 2012 N.C.A.A. tournament. He has recently withdrawn from Harvard.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Six months ago, the Harvard men's basketball team was a source of uncommon athletic pride on campus. The team was ranked among the nation's top 25 for the first time, and when it earned the program's first berth to the N.C.A.A. tournament in 66 years, students and players spilled into Harvard Square chanting and celebrating.
The next day, Harvard's staid campus of red-brick buildings was hardly one big pep rally, but from the Harvard bookstore, which printed commemorative basketball T-shirts, to the college's president, who called the team "a real community building force," the university seemed to bask in an atypical glow of sporting achievement.
But last week, days after published reports implicated the co-captains of the basketball team in a widespread academic cheating scandal that may involve dozens of varsity athletes, the mood at Harvard had shifted.
"I have foreign roommates who come from university systems where there is no role for athletics," Patrick Lane, a Harvard senior from Beverly, Mass., said as he stood in Harvard Yard. "So when they see athletes cutting corners like this, their response is to say, 'Good riddance.'
"And they are not the only students troubled. Some athletes are here working hard, but others avoid academic challenges. You know you won't find them in a deductive logic course, but you will find them in a much less taxing sociology course. They sometimes exist apart, and collectively gravitate to the same majors, like sociology or government. It's known."
Trevor Nash, a Harvard sophomore from the Atlanta area, said the initial reaction on campus was shock that as many as 125 students in a 279-person class with a reputation for favorable grading and a light workload — Government 1310: Introduction to Congress — were being investigated for cheating on a take-home final exam last semester.
"That's such a big number," Nash said. "The athletics part has just made it bigger. People are frustrated knowing that when Harvard comes up now, this is what people will talk about."
The news could reignite a contentious decades-old debate about athletes and academic integrity in the Ivy League. Eleven years ago, the publication of the book "The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values," by the former Princeton president William Bowen and James Shulman of the Mellon Foundation, used a vast database on the academic credentials, grades and majors of 90,000 students from 30 elite universities and colleges to depict an athletic culture that significantly influenced campus ethos.
Among the book's messages was that today's athletes at elite institutions enter college less academically prepared and with decidedly different goals and values than their classmates. While there was an organized and scholarly backlash, several top universities changed policies to monitor the academic choices of athletes and prohibited athletes from doing things like living together in what amounted to athletic dorms.
The outcome of the current Harvard investigation is unknown, but serious transgressions linked to Crimson athletes have not gone unnoticed.
"I had this notion that Harvard and the Ivies were different, but I guess they're not," said Gerald Gurney, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and until last year the president of the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics. "I know they have high standards, but we also know coaches and advisers find creative ways to place athletes in certain courses and majors that protect them."
He added: "It's good that they're looking into it at Harvard, but when athletes, and that includes their athletes, have to commit more than 40 hours a week to their sport, it's a formula for disaster."
By BENJAMIN HOFFMAN 19 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/sports/ncaabasketball/harvard-cheating-scandal-revives-debate-over-athletics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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