That is certainly a defensible strategy, one that has been adopted at most schools, and would lead us to have a smaller number of somewhat more well-supported teams. But it of course restricts opportunities for students and I would not have expected The Crimson to imply that it would favor such a move.

Athletes at Harvard are not a separate class of people, in spite of The Crimson's attempt to lump them together, generalize about them and divide them from their fellow students.

I suspect that the students who participate in our intercollegiate athletic programs are more broadly representative of America and the world than those in any other extracurricular or academic program, and almost certainly more diverse and representative than the staff of The Crimson.

Every student admitted to Harvard brings a combination of personal, academic and extracurricular qualities to the community. For whatever reason, Harvard athletes have tended to be very successful in later life, even by the high standards of the general Harvard alumni body.

In this series The Crimson has perfected the journalistic style of asserting a dramatic falsehood and the next day, once the falsehood has set the tone of an entire article, perhaps unapologetically nothing a correction.

Every outrageous example of inequity cited in your story appears to be false, and if these were edited out of your pieces, only a few rather ambiguous anecdotes would remain.

The NCAA champion women's lacrosse team did go to Washington, at Harvard's expense. The softball team does not have to pay for its own uniforms. The purported incident between athletic department officials and the organizers of Evening With Champions (which the athletic department has accommodated for years) did not, according to Cleary and Garber, take place as described (The Crimson does not even cite a first-hand source for its account).

The Crimson's selective and distorted reporting is quite remarkable. The coach pictured opposite the "Coaches...speak of inequities..." headline does no such thing when her words are found buried deep in the article.

Your first editorial states that "With coaches...complaints run thick and angry," but the plurality is utterly unsupported by your own reporting.

I understand that your reporters spoke with several coaches who expressed contentment with the treatment of women's teams, but their views were barely mentioned and did not inform your editorial. There is no mention of the coaches who coach both men's and women's teams.

Finally, while I have seen comparable examples of The Crimson's biased journalism on other issues, rarely have I seen The Crimson's hypocrisy as blatant.

On the sports page of the issue with the story, "Coaches, Students Speak of Inequities for Women's Teams," and the editorial "Level the Fields," I find three stories about men's sports, totaling 42 column inches of text: under a 30-point headline across the top, a lead story of 17 column inches detailing a serious loss by the men's basketball team to Dartmouth, which dropped the team's record to 2-4; a story about a member of the Dartmouth men's basketball team; and a story about Wade Boggs.

Only after all this, in the lower right-hand corner of the page, do I find a story about women's athletics: a mere 12 column inches plus a box about an exciting and important victory by the women's basketball team over Boston University, raising its record to 3-1.

In the four issues in which the athletics series appears decrying Harvard's hiring record for women coaches I count 13 sports articles written by men and one written by a woman.

In the Monday issue running the article entitled "Do All Athletic Teams Get Equal Support?" I find two pages of coverage of what The Crimson elsewhere calls the "high-profile" sports but nary a line of lead on the wrestling match or the men's and women's fencing meets that had taken place over the weekend.