Eric Smith ‘99 had some extensive comments on athletics and Williams.

In previous posts you had made it clear that you aren’t thrilled with the idea of tips (the students that get in due to sports) in the Williams world. I like to see viewpoints on many issues that differ from my own, so it is interesting for me to read about this. I must say that I am biased on the tips issue at Williams since I ran XC/Track while I was there and for all I know I was a tip when I got in early decision.

But one thing that stood out in this recent post was that you mentioned the students that would not be allowed to play basketball for Williams because a better athlete (but presumably worse off academically) had taken their place, would presumably be missing out on that experience. Which is interesting since you had in the past essentially said that if an athlete isn’t good enough academically, then they shouldn’t be at Williams. So with that comes a similar argument, that person might enjoy being at Williams with an academically diluted student body (presumably due to athletics letting in those horrific 1200-1300 SAT scores) more than being a big fish in a small pond (at a school of less prestige).

From there you could even perhaps argue from the viewpoint of Harvard’s Howard Gardner in that the SAT is biased and only accounts for a fraction of the possible intelligences of any given person. So would you rather have a school full of people that are good at taking the SAT (which is all that the SAT measures by his argument), or would you rather the experience of a pool of multiple intelligences? Of course that is a loaded question since Howard Gardner’s whole point is that there are multiple intelligences - arguing that the basketball player with lower SAT scores than the person that didn’t make the team (in our theoretical situation in discussion on the blog) has high strengths in other intelligences beyond the heavy math, logic, and language stresses of the SAT test. The obvious strength being towards the “physical” from Gardner’s intelligences (I believe there are 7 or 8, and don’t recall what they are exactly off of the top of my head).

Now, were we talking about MIT’s graduate math program, I think you could make a very solid and convincing argument that sports shouldn’t have any say in whether someone gets in. If you are going to be studying in a math specific program that is at the graduate level, you should be at the top for that - at least at MIT - and there is no real need to ensure those people are exposed to some good athletes too while at MIT.

But at a liberal arts college level, where you are encouraged to broaden your horizons and the whole experience is more important than any one class - I would argue that you would want the athletes in there. Just as you would want a representative pool of all of the different types of intelligences argued by Gardner.

Of course, all of this is greatly weakened if you don’t feel that Williams is truly liberal arts, or if you feel that Howard Gardner is way off base.

These are all good questions. My bias would be to believe that the basic assumption of Williams — make high school grades and standardized test scores the key criteria for admissions — is correct. But, if you don’t make that assumption, then all sorts of options become available.