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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Malcolm Gladwell on recruited athletes at Harvard:

The chapter opens with a livestream of a Harvard women's rugby game that six people are watching in which Harvard beats Princeton 61 to 5. You go into how this team was created, starting in 2013. In short, the coach is flying all over the world recruiting players who come from pretty specific upper-class circumstances. And you write that this is the way of many sports at Harvard, which happens to have more Division I sports than any other school in the country. Harvard has way more student-athletes than, say, the University of Michigan. And so you argue that the reason they're spending all this money flying around the world to populate sports that most colleges don’t have has to do with a tipping point — specifically with avoiding a tipping point. Can you describe your argument as to why Harvard is doing something that seems peculiar from the outside?

Malcolm Gladwell: Two things are going on. They're going to extraordinary lengths to recruit athletes who are good at sports that almost no one plays — fencing, rowing, rugby, on and on — not just the big ticket ones like football and basketball. And the second thing that they're doing is in order to ensure that these athletes will get into Harvard, they are giving these recruited athletes an admissions break that is enormous. Basically, they have an affirmative action program set up in place for students who excel at a specific number of sports. If you ask them why would they do those two things, the answers they give are completely unconvincing. They're bullshit. They can't even come up with a good line. They're like: “Well, it's sort of good for school spirit,” or basically versions of that, which make no sense. So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they're doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It's the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white — not exclusively — kids, and it's very difficult to do that if all you're doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited. So you’ve got to create a mechanism to get rich kids in the back door, and sports is the mechanism.

So if you're going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There's just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I'm saying is I'm going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That's what it's about.[/quote]

Quoting Gladwell these days, after all that has come out about his books and him, is a sign of profound ignorance. [/quote]

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