Happiness In The Ivy

Today we take a mid-week break for some sports news, which at least pertains to academics.

Back in the 1950s, the presidents of the eight Ivy League schools made a deliberate break from big-time football — a notion that was founded and flourished first at those schools. Think of a rule or innovation in the sport and it likely came from the Ivy League. The forward pass. The first down. Even the Michigan helmet started at Princeton. And the Campbell’s Soup can was made to resemble Cornell’s uniform.

But the universities elected to ensure that athletics would be aligned within the academic mission of the schools more than 50 years ago. So now, the crowds are much smaller. In general, the players aren’t as fast or as strong as their ‘big-time’ brethren. But, like the schools themselves, the competition is fierce and lessons learned on the field often outlive the lessons from the classroom.

So it was as a breath of fresh air to read a recent ESPN.com piece by Ivan Maisel, featuring two Ivy quarterbacks — Patrick Witt of Yale and Andrew Hatch of Harvard — who had made a choice to walk away from ‘big-time’ football and its trappings in favor of an Ivy League education.

Maisel explained why Witt left Nebraska for Yale:

What Witt wanted is the vibrant academic atmosphere he has found at Yale in classes such as “Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln” and “Comparative Welfare Policy in Developing Countries.” He wanted a locker room where the level of humor rose above towel-snapping. Girls are a topic of conversation, but so is health care.

“People would look at me as if I had three heads if I brought that up in the locker room out there,” Witt said of the latter. “And it’s not like we’re discussing these things all the time in the Yale locker room. … You can be talking about football one minute and launch into a debate about politics the next.”

Hatch has a similar story, and a national championship ring, in his journey from LSU to Harvard.