Random Ruminations of a Cornell Hockey Fan (Ag school joke intended...)
 
Issue One: Cornell defeats SLU, falls to Clarkson.
 
I doubt you'll hear many complaints out of Ithaca that the Red managed
"only" 2 points this weekend. The win over SLU is an extremely good
sign, especially to those of us who remember Cornell's descent into
obscurity (ninth place) after their last massive graduation/defection
of talent between '86 and '87. I'm hopeful that the two weekend
performances demark the boundaries of the team's talent: not in a class
with Clarkson (or the nation's other four or five best teams) but
competitive against the other conference powers. The home game against
Hahvahd in two weeks is a critical test.
 
Issue Two: Should the hockey schools secede from the N***?
 
This topic reminds me of the referenda to secede from the United States
occasionally considered in Vermont town meetings: an excellent
opportunity to indulge in rhetoric rendered completely meaningless by
political reality.
 
Issue Three: Should Cornell secede from the Ivy League?
 
See Issue Two, above. Anybody got an answer to this question: on what
formal level(s), especially those unconnected with athletics, does the
"Ivy League" actually exist?
 
Issue Four: The Great Academic Superiority Debate
 
I'd really like to just ignore this discussion, but several confusing
and/or silly comments have been made, and I thought a stab at clarity
might be in order.
 
"The Ivy League athletes [with the probable exception of the service
academies] represent the highest level of the term student-athlete."
 
This is a absurd generalization. In statistical terms, I'll bet there
is a greater variance in academic competence and commitment between
student-athletes in different sports at the same university than
between those of different schools across all sports.
 
"The impression of the Ivy schools being *so* superior in academics is just
 that."
 
I agree. A nasty thing about consensus perceptions is that they often
cut both ways. Among the Ancient Eight, the general impression of the
outside world is that the four oldest members (the "Feeble Four," to
extend the image): Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and one other, are
vastly superior to their less celebrated brethren: Columbia, Penn,
Brown, and Cornell. Many people involved in education and what scholars
like to call "the academy", especially those in other parts of the
country, are firmly convinced that the reality is precisely the
opposite, and that reputations twenty to fifty years out-of-date have
simply not had the time to catch up with the current quality of
education. As this calls into question the consensus perception in
comparisons within the Ivies, so should it call into question
comparisons between Ivies and non-Ivies.
 
IMHO, the quality of a student's *undergraduate* education depends 95%
on the student's motivation and intelligence and 5% on the
institution's resources and faculty. By this argument, a student body
composed of serious and committed students in and of itself makes a
school "good," and its absence renders a school "poor," academically.
By this criterion, it is unlikely that any university, or class of
universities, can claim qualitative superiority. BTW, if you think the
Ivies are the worst when it comes to this sort of self-serving
demagogery, you should live in Palo Alto for a few years.
 
"Just because an academic limit is set, it does not mean that your
students are any better that another school's."
 
There are two confusing things going on in this statement. The first is
the word "better," which opens up meritocratic arguments about the
talents a society should deem important. The way I read the rest of the
argument, it could as easily have been phrased "stronger academically,"
so let's start from there.
 
With the above change, the statement is strictly true, but irrelevant.
The real point is, while athletes scoring above the index cut-off can
and do go anywhere they want, athletes scoring below it are not
admitted to those schools which go by the index. The consequence is,
assuming the index means anything (which I recognize is a separate
argument), that the hockey players who attend the index schools have
indeed tended, overall, to be stronger academically, prior to their
admission to college, than have the hockey players who attend non-index
schools. That's not opinion - it's math.
 
Are the Ivies to be deified as champions of academic integrity for
restricting their athletic programs in this and other (shorter
schedules, limited practice hours, higher grade point to be maintained,
etc...) ways? Well, I don't think the effort should be dismissed
lightly as "Polly-Annish". Personally, I'd like to applaud the ideal
being promulgated without specifically crediting the Ivies for it,
because I seriously doubt that an Ivy League school is any more or less
interested in its students, its athletes, or the fate of the republic
than is any other corporation, er, university. An elite, prisitine,
above-these-crass-concerns image is a huge asset to Ivy, Inc. and so is
cultivated strenuously. For Large Midwestern University, Inc. an
excellent athletic program is such an asset, so it is in turn
cultivated. I see no difference in motive; whether I think the
consequences of one strategy or the other are more in keeping with the
purpose of a university is my own value judgement, and I won't burden you with
 it.
 
Greg Berge
Cornell, '85
Stanford, '87
 
Let's Go Red!