The great basketball encounter
David Baltimore

I had great fun on Friday evening, January 5. I joined many faculty, administrators, and students in cheering on our women’s basketball team as they played a more skilled MIT team. Although a long-time MIT denizen, I had no difficulty with my allegiance: three-plus years at Caltech have made me a total convert to the culture of smallness and focus. But this game came at a time when I’m involved in a debate over the shape of college athletics—and it was a telling experience.

Each Caltech score, down to the last, elicited an excited response from the gathered multitude (MIT, being far away, had just a handful of supporters). In spite of the generally 2:1 scoring ratio that MIT maintained from the start, few Tech fans left or reduced their commitment to the team. I assume that MIT, like Caltech, does not favor basketball players in their admissions, and that their superiority comes from the larger pool of more than 4,000 undergraduates from which they can draw. In fact, until recently I would have assumed that all educationally elite small schools admit only those they believe will excel academically. But that’s not true.

I’m a graduate of Swarthmore College, a highly selective liberal arts college of 1,300 students. I attended school with a small percentage of students who were intercollegiate athletes, but I thought they had been accepted for their academic and personal qualities, not for athletic ability. Thus, I’ve been very surprised to discover that for many years Swarthmore has accepted part of its class with an eye to producing winning sports teams—not overtly with athletic scholarships, but with a heavy tilt in the admissions process.

Recently, the school found that the percentage to whom they needed to give preference had risen to 30%, and the board decided to cut some sports—most notably, football. This move has raised an outcry from alumni about the importance of football, of diversity in the student body, of honoring tradition. Very few voices have decried giving preference to students for their athletic skills.

The Swarthmore administration argued that giving athletic preference in admissions is justified if they are to field winning, or at least competitive, intercollegiate sports teams. And Swarthmore is not alone. Amherst, Williams, and other elite liberal arts colleges feel the same need to beef up teams with students who otherwise would not be accepted. These activities are chronicled in a January 7 New York Times article and in a new book, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, by James Shulman and William Bowen.

I asked Tim Downes, our athletics director, whether Caltech athletes were discouraged by losing as frequently as they do. He replied that, while everyone likes to win, the players were just happy to be in intercollegiate competition, and didn’t need to win to feel it was a worthwhile activity. That certainly corresponds to what I saw in Braun on January 5. The team clearly knew they were being outplayed from the start, but their energy never flagged. It was a continual fight down to the final buzzer. And they had great moments when the passing and shooting really clicked. I hope and believe it is those moments that will live on in their memory, as they do in mine.

Caltech teams are populated by students who often didn’t play competitively in high school, and who welcome the unexpected chance to play intercollegiate sports. Some students, I’ve heard, come to Caltech partly because they know they can play on our teams without giving up their academic focus. Some even come knowing that, although they’re not particularly athletic in their genetic endowment, they will still be competitive here. For all of these students, we’re clearly doing things right.
So I’m sending this article to Al Bloom, president of Swarthmore, in the hope that he’ll see what amateur athletics is really about—that is, the fun of the encounter, not the number of wins.
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