Letters to the Editor

Ivy League setbacks To the editor: The Daily Pennsylvanian's recent reporting of academic banishment of top basketball players Patrick Harvey and Spencer Gloger, at Harvard and Princeton universities, respectively ("Gloger ineligible to play for Princeton," DP, 2/19/03), should not be a cause for celebration by Penn fans. These are sad personal setbacks for both men and bring no honor to the Ivy League as a whole. In Penn's own case, last fall's coverage of the Penn football team and the Harvard game in The New York Times went a long way to dispel the idea that Penn recruits or admits unfairly by lowering standards. I've always largely chalked up our athletic successes in certain sports to three things: relative size and diversity of the student body, classic facilities (the Palestra and Franklin Field) and the traditions associated with them and our well-coached winning teams in general. Still, the University has had its problems with classmen who really were primarily athletes. In my own days at Penn, many students were appalled by the ill fit on campus of certain members of the heavily-recruited football and then hockey teams. It never seemed fair to subject these players to a social and intellectual environment that made both them and the majority who were clearly "students first" -- whether they were athletes or not -- uneasy. Even in the current era, the ESPN GameDay coverage of the football team implied that our own quarterback was not entirely without social and academic troubles. In the end, all the schools would do well to heed the Ivy ideal more closely: students first, athletes second. We may not win as many out-of-league basketball games (though Duke and Stanford do pretty well) or get much further in the NCAA, except on rare occasions. Out-of-league football victories are great, but given team size, they seem to come at an even higher cost for uncertain glory. Nick SpitzerCollege '72 Cause for concern To the editor: On Thursday, Feb. 20, the Center for Africana Studies hosted a panel of the most highly accomplished and recognized scholars of Afro-American studies of the 21st century as part of its 30th year celebration. Among the panelists were Princeton professor Cornel West, author of Black Noise, Tricia Rose, creator of Afrocentricity Molefi Asante, black feminist Barbara Smith, Penn professor Michael Eric Dyson and author of Negritude Women, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting. For the DP to not report on this event represents the marginal status that the DP consistently grants Afro-American studies and Afro-American scholarship. Those that presented on this panel are not only leaders within Afro-American studies, they are multidisciplinary leaders of academia at large, whose critical analyses of social, literary, historical and religious theory are changing the ways that all of us think about scholarship. I cannot conceive of a reason for this event going unreported other than the DP not recognizing the importance of Afro-American scholars and their contributions to the world. I believe this is cause for great concern. Jerlina LoveCollege '04

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