CONGRATULATIONS, men's hockey team. You did real well.

Perhaps too well.

It is troubling, almost embarrassing, that Harvard fields a top-flight team in a professional sport. This is heresy, I know. But hear me out. I have my reasons, three of them.

Before I lay them out, I want to make it clear that I harbor no ill will toward any particular Harvard athlete. These folks are to be congratulated for doing what they do well as well as they can. It is not the athletes but the general cirsumtances of Harvard athletics that I find objectionable.

The Serious Student Objection. We undergrads go wild over the sports we decide are important. Men's squash wins the national championship routinely and no one seems to care, but when football or hockey gets good in its respective league, watch out.

Two weekends ago, the talk among Harvardians returning from spring break was almost exclusively of Providence. Didja hear we lost in the finals? Didja hear Fusco was out? Didja care?

More concretely, that Monday The Crimson chose to devote three full pages to the hockey team. That's more coverage than any news story has received in the past four years. And there was no hue and cry.

Why not? Because it is taken for granted that students are primarily interested in sports, that this is a major, perhaps the major concern of undergraduates.

Moreover, this bizarre devotion is taken for normal. Students should be slavish followers of sports teams. A Harvard undergraduate who doesn't give a damn whether the hockey team wins or loses is thought odd, standoffish. Sadly, the men who run Harvard feel the same way.

And they use this judgment to dismiss those students with serious non-sports interests. Do you care about academics? Those who support a women's studies concentration, like those who supported an Afro-American Studies department two decades ago, are thought to be out of their element. Do you care about investment policy? Again, such students are often ignored with smug complacency.

Harvard is not the only place where sports have often been used to dismiss the serious concerns of college students. At Berkeley, in 1964, when a large number of students protested what they felt were arbitrary and unfair administrative decisions, a football pep rally threatened to become political counter-demonstration.

At Harvard today, the opposition between sports and serious student concerns is more subtle, but nonetheless real. The houses with the highest percentage of athletes tend to vote most conservatively--against the campus norm--in political opinion polls. Varsity athletes are occasionally used as bodyguards by the University administration and more recently were recruited as bouncers for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals' ceremony honoring Sylvester Stallone, where they manhandled one poor slob who dared to protest the choice of honoree.

More generally, the mania students exhibit when the football team beats Yale, when the hockey team beats Cornell, when the crew team beats whoever is this year's runner-up, are outpourings of emotion which create an image of the frivolous Harvard undergraduate, an image which is sure to seep over and stain the administration's reactions to non-frivolous undergraduate projects.

It's a shame we can't have our fun and be taken seriously too, but given the either-or choice let's tone down the fun. It was a tough decision, I'll admit.

THE CELEBRITY Objection. Most people have a celebrity ratio of about one-to-one. That is, they are recognized by approximately as many people as they recognize. Some people have very high C-ratios: these famous folks are recognized by many more people than they recognize.