The Dumb Jock Factory

Columbia wants dumb jocks. We say we want student-athletes, but we really want dumb jocks.

The athletic department claims that it wants to "foster an inclusive environment that nurtures intellectual growth, physical development, and social interaction." Like any mission statement, it reads nicely, sets important goals, and makes everything seem very simple. It is also a lie.

Look at the policy: a sophomore athlete must have a cumulative 1.8 GPA to be eligible to play. For those counting at home, that's roughly four C-minuses and one C a semester. Juniors must ramp it up to a 1.9, while seniors need to average a flat C.

The rules are stricter for everyone else. Student government officials-who often get by with brains the size of a small legume-need at least a 2.5 every semester to stay in power. As a typical junior, if I skip every class, exam, and paper until May and get under a 2.0, I will go on academic probation. If my grades don't improve, then Columbia will kindly request that I leave.

Rarely is the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" so appropriate. Only about 20 percent of Columbia's 700 athletes made the Dean's List in the spring or fall of 2004, while twice as many Columbia College students made the cut.

In 2003, recently-fired football coach Bob Shoop bragged to the New York Times that "40 of our 70 players who participated in our winter program achieved a 3.0 grade point average or better and our team GPA for the spring, when we really demanded quite a bit from our guys, was 3.0." Given that graduate schools usually demand at least a B+ average, this kind of pride resembles a zookeeper bragging that his chimpanzee can make the sign for "I just farted."

In 2003, the book Reclaiming the Game-co-authored by an ex-president of Princeton and a former All-American athlete-systematically surveyed Ivy League athletics and found that college made jocks dumber. The class rank of a recruited athlete was, on average, 15 percentile points lower than a similar but non-athletic classmate with roughly the same field of study, SAT scores, class status, and race.

The problem wasn't time commitment. There was little difference between their in-season and off-season grades, the trend continued even if they quit the team, and students on work-study did not suffer the same effect.

At Columbia, the "student" half of student-athletes gets sacked. Why? The authors pointed to a vicious group dynamic: teams spend all their time together, coaches only need a 2.0 out of their players, and the all-encompassing athletic culture discourages academic success. (At NYU or Johns Hopkins, athletes are less isolated because the schools don't stretch their academic standards, and guess what? They do better.)

In other words, "athlete" is just another refried college identity. Like the Indian who comes to Columbia and learns Bhangra, or the Jew who finds Zionism, a kid who ran track becomes a "runner"; a linebacker becomes a proud "football player," even if he hasn't won a game. And, to the scrawny engineer, the linebacker-even if he hasn't said a stupid word in his life-automatically becomes a "dumbass football player."

This "stereotyping effect" is compounded by the stupid assumption that the key to fund-raising is a good sports team. The football team only received support when the administration tried to take away our God-given right to tailgate (and, most of the time, skip the actual game). One Spectator columnist ominously railed that "5,000 undergrads will one day be 5,000 alumni." Then, in the "Building a Brand" supplement Spectator put out at the end of last semester, five articles touting sports' (mostly football's) fund-raising capabilities filled the page. But the numbers don't add up, and the logic doesn't make sense.

The main "Building a Brand" article force-fed the fact that Penn's football team started winning in the late 1990's, and its fund-raising skyrocketed, while Columbia's team lost games and possible alumni money. It didn't mention that Penn was undertaking a massive new fund-raising and PR campaign, incessantly bragging about their new emphasis on the undergraduate college and preening for the U.S. News rankings. The only Ivy League team with any prominence was Princeton's basketball team, which was a genuine national powerhouse for a few years, and its fund-raising barely budged.

And, even though their teams kept losing, Columbia doubled its alumni-giving rate. No one goes to football games, but students are giving to the senior fund at unprecedented rates. Most of them-nearly all of us-consistently complain about the lack of community and splintered social worlds. So, maybe the vocal minority that is annoyed that Columbia isn't USC should stop bitching and start asking, "Why do the wrestlers sit at the same lunch table all the time?"

Avi Zvi Zenilman is a Columbia College junior concentrating in history. Head in the Box runs alternate Mondays.