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.”
Said Shulman, “The Game of Life” co-author: “The competitive pressures the Ivies face are similar to those that big-time sports schools face. The legend is that the Ivies don’t have any issues about sports, but that clearly is not true. They compete intensely for students, they compete to bring in more alumni donations and they compete for reputation. So, of course, intense competition leads to trade-offs.”
In the only interview she has granted about the cheating scandal, Harvard President Drew Faust last week told The Associated Press that athletes should not be singled out for blame.
“It is not about one student group,” Faust said. “It’s not confined to any one student group.”
When Harvard was asked for additional comment Tuesday, Jay M. Harris, dean of undergraduate education, issued a statement that said, in part: “Without integrity, there can be no genuine achievement, either at Harvard or anywhere else. We have held, and will continue to hold, every Harvard College student to that same high standard.”
Harvard’s senior basketball co-captains, Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry, have taken leaves of absences for the 2012-13 year, according to two Harvard officials briefed on the situation. The officials would not speak publicly about the case because of privacy laws. Casey, who was a preseason favorite for Ivy League player of the year, and Curry left Harvard days after a university administrator sent an e-mail message advising fall athletes who might be involved in the cheating scandal to consider taking a leave in order to preserve their eligibility.
Casey and Curry could be allowed to return for the 2013-14 year after what is essentially a one-year suspension, the most severe of the proposed penalties in the investigation. Had the players remained at Harvard and then been disciplined in the same manner, they would be prohibited from playing on the team and would have forfeited their final year of N.C.A.A. eligibility.
Other students from the class in question, including non-athletes who made up the majority in the class, have taken leaves as well.
At the same time, some students are choosing to fight the charges, which include either collaborating on answers or plagiarizing them outright. The cheating inquiry could take months to complete.
The course at the heart of the scandal was widely known as a class that required little effort to earn good grades, according to Harvard students interviewed late last week. That made it attractive to athletes with hefty travel and practice commitments. But several students who took the class last semester said the course was actually unusually difficult.
“It was one of the hardest courses I’ve had here,” said a student, a junior, who was in the course but is not being investigated. He did not want to give his name because he said the university had instructed students in the class not to comment publicly during the investigation.
“The take-home exam was given over a weekend,” said the student, a former athlete at Harvard. “And it took all of that; it pretty well ruined my weekend. There were many written essays to many questions. Often, when a professor gets a reputation for being easy, he’ll ramp things up in the next year. I think that’s what may have happened. Some people thought they could coast and instead they got in over their heads and had to look for a way out at the end.”
The professor of the class, Matthew B. Platt, did not return phone calls or e-mail messages seeking comment.
Several students said last week that instructions for what was considered inappropriate sharing of information among classmates were unclear and contradictory. An already evident byproduct of the situation has been a paragraph-long “Statement on Collaboration” affixed to syllabuses for the 2012 fall semester courses.
At Saturday’s season-opening football game, pregame tailgaters discussed the inquiry while doing their grilling on barbecues.
“It’s unfortunate and it shouldn’t have happened,” said Alex Spisak, a former Harvard football player who graduated in 2010.
He added: “Some people are running with this just because it is Harvard. It’s a great opportunity to tarnish a good name.”
After the game, Harvard’s football coach, Tim Murphy, said: “Harvard kids aren’t good kids; they’re great kids. But they don’t walk on water. And I think it’s important as parents and educators that we have to reinforce that crucial life lesson, that inappropriate behavior won’t be tolerated. Because down the road, later in life, those consequences can be terminal. They can cost you a marriage. They can cost you a career.”
Throughout the athletic department, no one is making public comments. One day last week, as dozens of athletes streamed across the stone bridge that separates the main Harvard campus from the athletic complex, few agreed to speak on the matter, even anonymously.
“There’s a ton of talk about the whole thing,” said one soccer player who did speak on the condition that his identity not be disclosed. “Many of us know someone involved. But we’ve been told in no uncertain terms that we should not talk to the media.”
After Saturday’s game, which the defending Ivy League champion Harvard Crimson won, 28-13, over the University of San Diego, the team captain Bobby Schneider said: “We don’t really talk about it, first of all, because we can’t talk about specifics. Obviously, other people are talking about it. Be that as it may, team morale is high. It’s not affecting us; we’ll be all right.”
Nash, the Harvard sophomore from Georgia, said there was one other perspective on the scandal that he had occasionally heard expressed by his peers.
“Some people were pretty excited about the upcoming basketball season,” he said. “Not as much anymore.”
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