If Haverford allowed its students to decide to strike, why not let them also decide on whether to hold an in person graduation outside with a two guest maximum? It would be fascinating to see the results if done by secret ballot. I’m guessing they would vote to hold gradation. Does that make them science deniers?
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Should we ask them if they want to have a party in Drinker?
To your point…if they really don’t like the idea, they’ll let the administration know. No polling required.
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Absolutely. These schools have been testing their students and employees weekly and many have explicitly discouraged townspeople from walking across campus as per their pre-pandemic habit. Why on earth would they make exceptions for a thousand adult visitors on literally the last day of the academic calendar?
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Circling back a bit to the original post, and to kind of answer a question asked of me, I think canceling athletics, which most programs have not, is likely to hurt the canceling schools with athletic recruitment for a while.
In general, most students at comparable colleges are having similar student experiences. But the athletes are having vastly different experiences. I haven’t researched how every campus is handling covid, but hopefully this will make sense.
Northwestern or Michigan vs. Cornell
Stanford vs. Harvard
Hopkins vs. Swat
I think academically these schools aren’t identical but probably a fair comparison. I think the student experience at them is probably similar this year. However, the athlete experience is far different. They are bearing a disproportionate burden at a select few schools, including Haverford (which I have not connection with either way, btw, so no dog in this fight at all).
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The students are either intelligent enough to make an informed decision or they are not. The problem is that they weren’t even afforded the opportunity to weigh in, and the same holds true for athletics, but apparently not strikes.
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Most students are not. Ohio State shut down football today. These big money schools gambled because they are big money. No one should be gambling.
Society could have handled this better but it’s been political, not based on science.
These kids are not just risking themselves but coaches, cafetaria workers, bus drivers. I’m sorry - but it’s ridiculous to think we should be playing sports.
If your education is less, should you pay less, etc. Yes - but that’s something you have to convince the institutions of, etc.
Oh well - we all have opinions but I feel like most on the board are why we still have this issue. If everyone would shelter for 3 weeks, we’d be much better.
Texas cases have dropped dramatically - no why - everyone was isolated due to the cold. Forced distancing.
We know what works. Everyone just wants to dance around it and come up with how they can still safely do stuff.
The big money conferences cancelled games, 1AA switched to Spring. They held their games at all costs…and some of these kids may lose their health long term. We don’t know.
That’s too big a risk to take - in my opnion.
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Your theory makes a lot of sense, but I guess the reality is how many athletes A) have a choice, and B) could have planned ahead.
The lesson: in a pandemic, if you want to play your sport, play D1. There are probably some kids at Haverford who had that choice, but they likely downgraded their level of athletic competition to increase their academics. Many used athletics as a way in to a school like Haverford, without any real possibility of playing D1.
Ultimately, I don’t think how schools have handled these issue will have a major impact. For every post here suggesting “my kids had options”, there is a kid who playing someplace this spring who didn’t get in and would gladly trade 15 games to attend Haverford for 4 years.
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Maybe not a few bench players at Haverford, but most of these kids had a choice. Certainly most/all of the Ivy athletes did. My kid turned down several academically equivalent schools where he would be having a much better experience. He had no way to know that, but the kids coming up can see how these schools seem incapable of handling a problem most other schools can figure out.
That’s the real problem. Both for the future but also for increasing the divide. The regular students are having the same experience. But at these few schools the athletes are not. It is pretty difficult to see your peers at Northwestern and Stanford still playing when your school says it isn’t possible.
My son has some specific reasons he is staying put, I’m not going into details because it would identify him but his specific situation is pretty unique and only affects a couple of athletes in the country. But for that, he would be in the transfer portal already.
ETA I don’t see any of his current teammates on track to be donors to the school in the future. That may mellow with time, but they feel like their school cheated them and singled them out this year. Given that a lot of athletes gravitate towards careers where they have the potential to be big donors, I think that will hurt these schools down the road.
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I feel bad going back and forth, because honestly feelings are feelings and I can’t say someone doesn’t have their own feelings… so I’ll stop replying after this, but… what is happening is quite the opposite of your last paragraph. It seems these athletes are feeling cheated because they weren’t singled out, in fact. They’re being treated like every other student in the school. It really comes off that what they wanted was special treatment, not equal treatment.
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They wanted the same treatment that comparable schools gave their student athletes. That is not what they are getting.
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Yeah, I gotta say I am completely gob smacked by the difference in world view between athletes and non-athletes even on such a small campus as Haverford. Was it always like this in DIII conferences, like when kids could just walk on to join teams?
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NESCAC will have limited spring sports, just released about 15 minutes ago.
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Haverford sent a note today asking kids not to travel for the upcoming holidays. They are seriously concerned about an outbreak.
I honestly sympathize, it sucks, but the Tri-Co schools are not similar to other schools in the conference. Hopkins has a D1 Lacrosse program, they can’t tell some students they can play and others they can’t.
The real issue (IMO) in this decision is that the Tri-Co can afford not to play, both in reputation and financial risk…the others are under a lot more pressure. F&M (the next highest rated school in the conference) has an acceptance rate twice that of Haverfords. It also has an endowment of $154k/student vs. Haverfords $404k (the lowest in the Tri-co…Swat’s is $1.3M and in the top 10 of all schools). In this case, that money allows them to stay conservative and not have to take risks.
The NESCAC announcement is interesting… we’ll play if we can get 6 teams? Let the political games begin…
EDIT…we’ll see how my finance theory holds up in the NESCAC.
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When I went to Haverford in the '80s, it was definitely not like this. Yes, a lot of the athletes lived together, but I don’t remember this sort of divide. I’m pretty certain that there wasn’t this much recruiting, and there were still JV teams filled with walk-ons. (AFAIK JV teams have been replaced with club sports.) I remember several friends walking on to the women’s JV lacrosse team who had never picked up a stick.
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@gotham_mom - I would believe that there is a major increase in focus for sports at Haverford since the 80’s. I can’t speak to the 80’s, but my experiences at the games and the number of times athletes have been referenced in non-sports/social conversation suggests sports are a primary social marker at Haverford.
The same is not true at Swat. The teams are similar in performance (minus the rare very good team like Swat’s Men’s BB team the past few years), yet the athletes seem a lot more integrated into non-sports social groups. They hung out together, but they all had other groups that were just as active and social as the athletes. I don’t get that vibe at Haverford.
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This is exactly how I feel about my D and her teammates, and D has said as much.
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It’s not risky to play sports outdoors, especially non-contact sports. Haverford is even more of an outlier now that the NESCACS agreed it is safe to play.
The NFHS quotes rates of sport-documented spread as on the order of 13 per 100,000 players days, which means after about 2 years of continuous play, or 5 years of regular seasons, Haverford might have a case or two. The CDC emphasizes the low risk of outdoor sports and offers detailed plans for safe play, all of which are easily fulfilled. The overwhelming majority of cases in athletes occur in post- play social gatherings. That’s the science we are talking about.
President Raymond is showing less trust and more paranoia as regards her students than the majority of college presidents.
An amusing fact about this thread is it is clearly demonstrating that as an athlete, if you come to Haverford, this is how you’ll be treated by non-athletes and the current administration.
I also have to add here, though it will likely bring more wrath and disparaging comments down on my head, that perhaps my absolute conviction that this is safe is from my professional experience this past year taking care of actual COVID patients. I have had over 150 hours of covid related education from top scientists, physicians and epidemiologists from a nationally recognized health system and research institute. Using proper precautions, I have examined and treated covid patients, some too young to wear masks, often in small enclosed rooms for greater than 20 minutes. My institution told me it was safe for me to work under these conditions, and with due diligence I would be fine. I also would have been fired if I had refused to see COVID patients.
I think the governor of Texas is worse than an idiot and my family spent the holidays apart. I haven’t eaten in a restaurant in a year because it isn’t safe. But forbidding outdoor sports is a crazy over-generalization and President Raymond should NOT be allowed to use her personal phobia to set policy.
#LettheFordsplay!
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Fwiw, development professionals have done a lot of data mining around athletes and giving at a number of schools (primarily ivy and D1). They are generally not generous donors. Many feel they were exploited by the school for their athletic talents. While I doubt that the inverse of this rule also holds – we cancel your season and you’re not exploited so you want to give-- I am not convinced that the schools are playing with their future giving by denying these kids their season.
With that said, it will be interesting to see how all of these kids, starting with the class of 2020, feel connected to their alma mater as alums and how that affects giving. Not just Haverford.
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Many students have already transferred. I was watching a Duke/DU men’s lacrosse game and there was a transfer from Princeton on the Duke team and 3 from Yale on the DU team. That was the day the Ivy league announced there would not be a 2021 Ivy spring season. Some of the players graduate from the Ivy school and then go play their year of eligibility (now 2 years) and have the best of both world - and Ivy diploma and some great years of playing.
The Ivy teams will not recover quickly. They’ll have seniors and juniors who haven’t played in 2 years (and may not have seen game time as freshmen and sophs). They’ll have younger players with no experience. Of course they’ll be able to recruit full teams as they are Princeton and Yale after all, but a really good player may just choose Duke or Notre Dame. The teams that took 2 seasons off will take a few years to recover.
I think good athletes will reconsider the smaller schools like Haverford (which already had a reputation of approving students in pre-reads but not offering admissions). Why not just go to Duke or Hopkins or Syracuse for a great education and a top lacrosse experience?
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How many of the Haverford Lacrosse seniors, a team that during their tenure is 13-23 in DIII including a 1-5 start to last year, are going to play at Duke, or Hopkins, or Syracuse?
There is a reason players go to Haverford, and if being on a successful team to potentially win a National Championship or have an MLL career is their primary goal, they should have gone somewhere else. For every star transfer into Duke, there is a kid now thinking about finishing out someplace else because they don’t see a path to much playing time. It’s not a zero-sum game, but it’s close. How many more transfers could Duke have accepted? None is my guess.
The notion of these large migrations is more bombast than threat. My guess is that Haverford will find a way to have a Lacrosse team next year.
And how do those socially active athletes get to their competitions not on campus?
If you’re going to site the science on sports, then you have to also consider the science on pods, community spread, enclosed spaces, etc. However unlikely, would you agree that if 1 member of a team is unknowingly positive, sitting in a van for 4 hours (2 each way) to F&M or Gettysburg is a bad idea based on the science?
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