The Fortunes of Dartmouth Football: Furstenberg's Faux Pas

By Kale Bongers | Sunday, June 12, 2005

The Program

Though the word is often so overused as to lose its meaning, it is fair to say that Dartmouth's football program is storied in the finest sense of the word. The program's overall record is 636-387-46. Dartmouth still holds the Ivy League record with seventeen football titles (outright or shared) in forty-eight seasons; by comparison, its nearest competitors, Yale and Penn, have only thirteen. Since the official creation of the Ivy League in 1956, Dartmouth has scored the most points, allowed the fewest, and put more of its players on the first team all-conference than any other school in the Ancient Eight. Seven men of Dartmouth (and four Dartmouth coaches) are enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana; at least one Dartmouth football player, Ed Healey '19, is in its professional counterpart in Canton, Ohio (Columbia and Harvard are the only other Ivies that have placed a man in the professional Hall). The Green even have the 1925 national championship to their credit.

These on-the-field accomplishments are no less impressive than the accomplishments of Dartmouth football players off the field. Currently, the only two Dartmouth alums running Fortune 500 corporations are Jeffrey Immelt '78 (General Electric) and Hank Paulson '68 (Goldman Sachs) are former football players. Trustee (also successful businessman and class salutatorian) T.J. Rodgers '70 and banker Bruce Rauner '78 (who donated $5 million to Dartmouth to create the Rauner Special Collections Library) also played football at the College. Football players have also proven their worth in the classroom: to note a few, Paul Sorensen '89 was his class valedictorian, and David McLaughlin '54, Dartmouth's late President Emeritus, won the Barrett Cup as "giving the greatest promise of becoming a factor in the outside world through his strength of character and the qualities of leadership, record of scholarship, broad achievement, and influence among his fellows." Indeed, many of the college's most dedicated, generous, and well-positioned alumni once suited up in Dartmouth green and white to play on Memorial Field. Such is another, more important legacy of Dartmouth football—that of building character for future endeavors.

After head football coach Buddy Teevens '79 resigned in late 1991, John Lyons, then the Big Green's defensive coordinator, ascended to the top job, along with high hopes and expectations. Lyons proved the faith put in his coaching abilities was not misplaced; from 1992 to 1997, he compiled an impressive 44-15-1 record, and coached the undefeated 1996 team that won the Ivy League title. Lyons was in demand, and surely could have gone on to bigger and better things, but he chose to remain in Hanover, confident his next six seasons as Dartmouth's head football coach would be as rosy as the first six had been.

They were not; indeed, after the epic 1996 campaign, Big Green football almost immediately began to decline, a decline which has continued to this day. Five of Dartmouth's six worst seasons since 1950 have come in the past seven seasons. Since the 1998 season, the Green have won only sixteen games—it won eighteen in the 1996 and 1997 seasons alone. Indeed, in the past seven seasons, Dartmouth has had a .231 winning percentage, a far cry from its average .621 winning percentage since football's inception at the College in 1881. The conclusion of the 2004 season marked the longest period Dartmouth has been without an Ivy League football championship (eight seasons) since league play began in 1956. The 2004 campaign also brought an end to John Lyons' tenure as head coach; he was fired at the end of the season, replaced by the man he had replaced in 1991, and who had recently been fired by Division I-A Stanford, Buddy Teevens '79.

The Rules

Dartmouth is bound to the strictest recruiting code in the NCAA due to its membership in the Ivy League. The Ivy League is different from every other conference in Division I athletics because of its well-known no-scholarship policy. In reality, however, that's just the beginning when it comes to limitations on sports. Ivy League athletic programs are unique in their adherence to the Academic Index, or A.I. A statistic made from a jumbled conglomeration of class rank, high school G.P.A., and S.A.T. scores, the A.I. is a somewhat cosmetic gesture. It's a way to stop public accusations that, noted Dartmouth deputy athletic director Bob Ceplikas in the recent book Playing the Game, "Penn was taking dumb basketball players and Cornell was taking dumb hockey players." A.I. has made the system numerical, open, and simple—all other Ivy League schools are able to look at the recruiting numbers to maintain adherence.

The A.I. is based on statistics, particularly in regard to intercollegiate athletics. For the so-called 'money sports'—essentially the football, men's basketball, and men's hockey teams—the average A.I. of each recruiting class can be no more than one standard deviation below the college's average A.I. For football, however, a more stringent banding program is in place. Every year, each Ancient Eight college may recruit approximately thirty football players (for a maximum of 120 over four years). These admissions fall within four bands: the school's mean A.I. to one standard deviation below it, one standard deviation to two s.d., two s.d. to 2.5 s.d., and 2.5 standard deviations to the Ivy League A.I. floor, currently set at 171 out of 240 (Dartmouth's incoming class, by comparison, has an average AI of around 212). The bands carry strict numerical limits; a team may admit eight from the highest band, thirteen from the next, seven from the third, and two from the lowest per year. To admit any student-athlete below the Ivy floor, the college must ask for a special dispensation from the League, which has not been granted in years. Due to the ever-dwindling number of allowed football recruits (the number has been slowly decreasing for decades), all Ivy League schools are being pushed into competition for an ever-narrower supply of top students who are also accomplished athletes. Because the Ivy League does not adhere to the N.C.A.A.'s National Letter of Intent, this competition can become intense; Harvard, in particular, is infamous for bending the rules.

All of these regulations combine to create a difficult situation, one in which cooperation between the athletic department and the admissions office is a necessity to maintain successful programs. In recent times, the athletics-admissions relationship has been lacking—for the past several years, Dartmouth has placed among the worst in the Ivy League in athletic accomplishment.

The Letter, and the Blame

If anyone had suspicions regarding the causes of Dartmouth's football decline, they kept fairly quiet until John Lyons' firing late last year. Or, more specifically, until December 10, when the Valley News published a juicy tidbit, a reference to a letter written by Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg on December 20th, 2000. In this letter to Swarthmore College President Alfred Bloom, Furstenberg made several now-infamous remarks. Among them:

I am writing to commend you on the decision to eliminate football from your athletic offerings. Other institutions would do well to follow your lead. I know you've heard a lot of criticism about this decision, but I, for one, support this change.

You are exactly right in asserting that football programs represent a sacrifice to the academic quality and diversity of entering first-year classes. This is particularly true at highly selective institutions that aspire to academic excellence. My experience at both Wesleyan and Dartmouth is consistent with what you have observed at Swarthmore. I wish this were not true but sadly football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours. This is really a national problem and it is a good thing that you are taking leadership on the issue. A close examination of intercollegiate athletics within the Ivy League would point to other sports in which the same phenomenon is apparent.

Such statements immediately aroused the ire of many alumni, and caused the Dartmouth Public Affairs Office to shift into overdrive, issuing frantic apologies from Furstenberg, Athletic Director Josie Harper, President Wright, and others. Immediately the question of blame arose—was Furstenberg to blame for Dartmouth's athletic woes?

No one denies that Furstenberg was a knuckle-head. First, he shouldn't have written his ignoble letter on Dartmouth letterhead, making it appear he wrote the letter in his official capacity. This is actually not far from the truth; Furstenberg's "personal letter" was apparently something more than private. An internal source in the Dartmouth administration alleged that the letter played some role in Bloom's case against Swarthmore football before the college's board; the idea was, "Even Dartmouth would eliminate their football team if they could." Using the letter, we are told, Bloom was able to gain some leverage.

Ordinarily such things are private affairs, and it's likely the letter would never have seen the light of day, much less been the subject of a nationwide controversy—had a Dartmouth alum not sat on the Swarthmore board in question. The alum, in turn, informed President Wright, who handled the matter internally until the Valley News broke the story last December. The Valley News has not revealed how it obtained the letter, and the College administration has neither confirmed nor denied the allegations about the role the letter played at Swarthmore.

The letter's sudden appearance brought still more questions about the Dean's conduct. What Furstenberg should have done is admit his mistake at the time, not four years after the fact with all the appearance of an institutional cover-up. An apology only after being caught isn't much of an apology. Third, Furstenberg needed (and still needs) to understand the deep scars his words have caused—surely even his staunchest supporters would be calling for his head on a silver platter had he claimed another group, say homosexuals or blacks, "and the culture that surrounds [them, are] antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours." Such is the outrage many football players and alums have from the Furstenberg letter.

For these many transgressions, wound up in a single, nearly incomprehensibly stupid act, Furstenberg should be fired. Some think the dean was merely stating an unspeakable truism; others think it calls into question his impartiality. The former is untrue, the latter unproven. However, no one can dispute that was an abuse of the dean's position of authority at the College—using the weight of the office for personal reasons rather than to support the College is unconscionable.

Further, everything espoused in the letter was a direct contravention of his job description. The dean's job is to sell Dartmouth, to make it appear in a good light, and to exercise sound judgment. The Bloom letter did none of the three, and did none of them in an all-too-public way. If a corporation in the private sector had a high-ranking administrator who perpetrated similar misdeeds, the vengeance of top management would come down swiftly. Dartmouth's response to the Furstenberg case should be no different—he showed disregard for the institution he represented, and for that, he must be shown the door.

Still, blaming the dean alone for the cataclysmic decline in Dartmouth's athletic prowess is too simplistic. Indeed, Furstenberg did admit the players that formed the nucleus of the 1996 undefeated Ivy League champions. Now, some may say that his intense dislike of football developed after this time, but that isn't entirely likely. Instead, Furstenberg is but a mere cog in the giant Dartmouth machine, subject to the whims of his superiors. Those seeking the central cause of the College's athletic collapse thus need not look to Hanover and the Admissions Office but rather to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the home of Dartmouth's President Emeritus, James Freedman.

Freedman's ties to the decline of Dartmouth athletics are far-reaching. Some of the impacts were direct; his much-maligned quest to admit "creative loners" instead of athletes, future fraternity brothers, and the like was a big influence, as one tends not to find such "loners" playing high-caliber team sports (which, by definition, are not solitary), but rather avoiding all human contact and practicing their cello or scribbling quatrains. Yet Freedman also had more indirect effects. In this quest for a new type of Dartmouth student, he oversaw the steady and pronounced rise of the College's average SAT score, essentially deemphasizing the traditional admissions emphasis on leadership qualities and teamwork in favor of a strict numbers game. As the SAT average increased, so did the College's average A.I., to the point where today Dartmouth's A.I. is only a fraction behind those of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and handily ahead of Brown, Columbia, Penn, and Cornell.

Freedman had moved Dartmouth into a difficult position. Most athletes, given the choice, will overwhelmingly choose Harvard, Yale or Princeton over the College (often at rates of eight or nine to one), for reasons of both perceived prestige and better financial aid. Brown, Columbia, Penn, and Cornell, meanwhile, having lower average A.I.s, also have wider pools of athletes from which to choose, and can recruit more of the lower scorers. Thus, thanks to Freedman's vision of a brave new Dartmouth, the College is in a precarious recruiting situation; it has lost its constituency. Its recruiting pool has dwindled as it gets hit from above and below.

It was not always this way: Dartmouth administrators once valued athletics as a valuable component of any worthwhile education. As men of Dartmouth have forsaken administrative positions at the alma mater, however, a new type of official has taken their place. Freedman and Furstenberg are examples of this new breed of College man—the career administrator. They have a vision for what the College ought to be—a vision that is often at odds with what the alumni and students of that institution would prefer.

John Sloan Dickey 1929, College President from 1945 to 1970, a man deeply in tune with Dartmouth's delicate tensions between tradition and progress, understood Dartmouth's purpose differently—he saw Dartmouth as a place to train leaders of men for service to the world. Dickey understood that athletics, and football, were valuable ways to instill leadership, self-discipline, and sacrifice in young men; perhaps for this reason he often visited football practices to talk to the players or merely to observe. Dickey saw the grand opportunity of higher education was not to produce ivory-tower philosophers, but rather to produce leaders. Surely David McLaughlin 1954 would have agreed with such sentiment.

Until that administrative commitment is restored, it is Dartmouth's fate to cellar-dwell in most of its competitive athletic endeavors.

The Future

The future success of Dartmouth athletics is, in a word, uncertain. Some teams are likely to fare (and have fared) better than others. The men's hockey team, for instance, consistently recruits excellent players (this season, seven Big Green icers are N.H.L. draft picks); the men's basketball team has potential for doing so. Dartmouth football, however, might prove more difficult to resurrect, largely do to the larger team size: while a hockey or basketball team can fare quite well with three or four outstanding players, football needs many more.

More dangerously, Furstenberg's letter may come back to haunt the College. Student-athletes and coaches want and need institutional support, and the letter is weighty proof in many people's minds that this support does not exist. The nationwide exposure the letter received may cause athletes who could lead Dartmouth to Ivy League championships in the future to switch allegiances and win those championships for, say, Penn. Surely, the day after the Furstenberg letter broke, other Ivy League coaches had integrated it into their recruiting pep talks, along the lines of Yale football coach Jack Siedlecki: "As a parent, it would certainly make me question sending my son or daughter to Dartmouth to be a student athlete." Even more disappointing, Siedlecki and other Ivy coaches will be able to use this devastating line until Furstenberg resigns or is fired.

Further, the College's credibility among its alumni and donors, still reeling from the S.L.I. fiasco and the swim team debacle, has reached a new nadir. The College, counting on the alumni for support in its new, $1.3 billion 'Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience,' may find the lofty goal a tough sell.

Nevertheless, the recent hiring of Buddy Teevens '79, lately of Stanford, can be a turning of the corner for Big Green athletics. A coach with proven Ivy League success to his credit, Teevens brings the optimism and ability to bring Dartmouth football to prominence once more. In his introductory press conference, he buoyantly expressed hope that Dartmouth football players can compete on the field as well as in the classroom, and expressing confidence in the institutional support he will receive.

Further, Teevens has proven able to recruit at a high academic and athletic level; his status as a Dartmouth alum cannot but further help him. He also extracted several important concessions from the College and the Athletics department as part of his new contract. For example, the antiquated football training facilities will be refurbished. Thus, while there is a lot more housecleaning to be done in McNutt Hall before the transformation is complete, the future is beginning to look brighter. Hopefully, before too long, Dartmouth will be able to hoist yet another Ivy League championship pennant atop the green expanse of Memorial Field.

The Fortunes of Dartmouth Football: Furstenberg's Faux Pas

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