Buy the Dartmouth Swim Team on eBay

My favorite school is the University of Chicago (where I went to grad school.) It still has the best overall football record, percentage wise, in the Big Ten, but dropped out of the league because it felt football had an inappropriate effect on campus and academic life (more accurately, its academic standards and admission policies were having a negative effect on football success.) Now it plays an active Division III sport schedule, with lots of student participation. Another favorite school is the California Institute of Technology which plays a complete lineup of competitive sports, also in Division III. The teams are not very good, but given how small the student body is, the percent participation is very large. It is a mistake to think that an athletic department should be self-supporting. Instead, a comprehensive sports and recreation program is part of the college education - recognizing that the brain and body are part of one person, and no person can be complete without developing all aspects of oneself. Nobody expects that the college english or sociology or biology department pay for themselves, the athletic department and the individual sports should not either. The schools I mentioned understand this, as does Stanford and (most) of the Ivies and many of the liberal-arts colleges that are around. On a personal note, a significant factor in deciding what college to attend was that it have a swimming team that I could participate in (and I did not attend better academic schools just because they had *too* good of a team.) I went to a school very similar to Dartmouth (isolated, cold, small) so I could very well have selected Dartmouth instead of the one I did. The strenth of my college application was my academics, not my swimming (I was not recruited by anyone), but I know that I would not have gone to any school that did not have a team. I'm sure that Dartmouth will not notice the loss of acceptances by the few applicants that feel the same I did. But Dartmouth, next year, will be less of a school than it used to be.

My favorite school is the University of Chicago (where I went to grad school.) It still has the best overall football record, percentage wise, in the Big Ten, but dropped out of the league because it felt football had an inappropriate effect on campus and academic life (more accurately, its academic standards and admission policies were having a negative effect on football success.) Now it plays an active Division III sport schedule, with lots of student participation. Another favorite school is the California Institute of Technology which plays a complete lineup of competitive sports, also in Division III. The teams are not very good, but given how small the student body is, the percent participation is very large. It is a mistake to think that an athletic department should be self-supporting. Instead, a comprehensive sports and recreation program is part of the college education - recognizing that the brain and body are part of one person, and no person can be complete without developing all aspects of oneself. Nobody expects that the college english or sociology or biology department pay for themselves, the athletic department and the individual sports should not either. The schools I mentioned understand this, as does Stanford and (most) of the Ivies and many of the liberal-arts colleges that are around. On a personal note, a significant factor in deciding what college to attend was that it have a swimming team that I could participate in (and I did not attend better academic schools just because they had *too* good of a team.) I went to a school very similar to Dartmouth (isolated, cold, small) so I could very well have selected Dartmouth instead of the one I did. The strenth of my college application was my academics, not my swimming (I was not recruited by anyone), but I know that I would not have gone to any school that did not have a team. I'm sure that Dartmouth will not notice the loss of acceptances by the few applicants that feel the same I did. But Dartmouth, next year, will be less of a school than it used to be.