Your four-part series on Harvard athletics and two-part editorial contain so many errors, innuendoes, distortions, and omissions that I hardly know where to begin responding.

Perhaps it is best to state a few facts, make a few corrections, and point out a few oddities of your reporting and editorializing policies.

First, a few basic facts. Harvard fields 64 teams in 40 sports, more sports than any other Division I institution in the country. There are teams in 19 women's sports and 21 men's sports.

Club teams include everything from aikido to ultimate frisbee. We have huge intramural and recreational athletic programs, involving more than 3,900 students each year. (For some reason there is no mention of these in your stories; one would think that the athletic department simply ran the varsity sports, and that the only athletes at Harvard were intercollegiate.)

There are many recreational classes under the sponsorship of the athletic department, including everything from aerobics to yoga. Our athletic facilities are in most cases in use up to or beyond their capacities, and the department is constantly struggling to find ways to accommodate all those who desire to use them.

Unlike many of our peer institutions, Harvard has not cut any sports under the recent budgetary pressures, and has continued to expand recreational programs. It has, however, cut staff to save money, rather than cutting teams or programs.

Under these circumstances, prioritization and conflicts of perceived priorities are inevitable. Indeed, your first editorial is naive in suggesting that comparable disagreements about resource allocation are rare within academic departments.

Proposals for changes in support level come to the Faculty Committee (which has student members) for discussion, though there have been no changes in the past few years because the program has been operating pretty much at the maximum of what can be done.

The budget of the athletic department is under the control and scrutiny of the dean of the Faculty and his staff, like the budget of every other department of the Faculty. The references to unaccounted-for cash are completely unfounded in anything factual you report and are groundless.

The suggestion that athletics are run the way they are at Harvard in order to generate revenues is an absolute fantasy. Financially it is a losing proposition to maintain a couple of fencing teams, a co-ed boxing program, a women's ice hockey team, a Straus Cup competition.

Nonetheless, Harvard supports all these and has even chosen not to follow most of the Ivy League in cutting freshman football (this was probably the major team story of the fall, but went unmentioned in your reporting).

Athletics are Harvard are run for the benefit of the students, faculty and staff, not the alumni, not the athletic department and certainly not the Treasurer.

The department has done everything possible to keep participation at a high level. If the primary objective were financial maximization, we would have a small number of "revenue-producing" sports and nothing else. This is in fact the pattern at the schools that are known as athletic powerhouses.

Harvard is the extreme point at the other end of the spectrum. Students enjoy and are enriched by their participation in athletics at Harvard and often continue to take pride and interest in our programs after they graduate, but that is vastly different from the suggestion that athletics are maintained because they pay.

We would all prefer to have enough money so that teams (and orchestras, etc.) did not have to do any of their own fundraising, but I am surprised to see The Crimson suggest, as it does in its December 16 editorial, that it would be preferable to kill the men's water polo team than to put it under a fundraising burden.