How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campuses
“We have this idea that college sports are a big part of college life — and, it shouldn’t be — but if I told the average student they were going to Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, there would be a higher likelihood of them attending.” – University President Lawrence Bacow, at an event celebrating the Harvard-Yale “H1B” program.
“We can’t keep spending money in the name of education and making it the way we want it to be.”
— University President Lawrence Bacow, at an event celebrating the Harvard-Yale “H1B” program
In today’s college and the world at large, college sports have become an easy target for the forces that seek to undermine “real learning.” In the battle to prevent college sports from becoming a tool for social inequality, we must also recognize that many colleges and universities have become “sports-obsessed” and that this is not just bad for athletics, but also bad for “real learning.” The Harvard-Yale program exemplifies this anti-education mentality, and is also yet another example of an athletic department that has become an ideological battleground.
The Harvard-Yale program, which is one of the few that has been able to sustain itself for more than a decade, is widely seen as a success, as opposed to another of the many examples of collegiate athletic programs that exist today that are doomed to a fall from this success. The program has provided unprecedented opportunities for marginalized groups and students, and has allowed hundreds of students to get a degree that they otherwise could not have received. The program is an example of what can happen when the government allows universities to manage their own affairs with little external oversight.
In reality, Harvard and Yale are not just part of a trend going by the name of “sports-madness” that includes programs like the NCAA and HCCC’s $1.5 million prize-winning video project, The University, which seeks to bring about educational reform. They are instead an aberration.
In order to provide a comprehensive review of the Harvard-Yale program, it is useful to
