Many athletes share Lewis’ belief that recruiting increases the general diversity of the school.

“The genre of ‘athlete’ includes many races, economic levels, intelligence levels, and social levels,” says women’s basketball captain Katie Gates ’02.

History of The Issue

The Ivy League was founded—originally as a football conference in 1945—in an attempt to set academic standards, eligibility requirements and financial aid regulations.

The presidents of the Ivy League schools declared in a 1954 agreement that recruited athletes should be “representative” of the academic standards of their school.

The need to avoid intense competition in admission for athletic stars, led the Ivy League presidents in 1979 to institute the academic index—a score assigned to recruits based on their standardized test scores and their high school class rank—that is still in place today. The presidents set a minimum score which all recruits must exceed.

“We didn’t want to make admissions decisions to win conference championships,” says Jeffrey Orleans, the current executive director of the Ivy League.

The presidents also worried that Ivy sports may be growing too professional, and in a 1980 meeting unanimously adopted the “Parry-Ryan” report that limited practice and game schedules in an effort to downscale the demands on athletes.

Athletic directors involved in the current meetings this spring say further reforms of what were initially laid out in this report could be the chosen route of the presidents to reform the League’s athletics.

The last major alteration to the recruiting policy occurred in 1991, when the presidents decided to reduce the number of football recruits from 50 to 35 and allow first-years to play on the varsity team, rather than on a separate first-year squad.

Fueling these movements toward reduction, Orleans says, is the natural impetus of admissions committees of Ivy League schools to seek to limit the number of recruits because of the relatively small student bodies.

Last June, Orleans says the Ivy presidents made it clear to the athletic directors that they once again wanted to look into the number of recruits.

At a meeting last November, Orleans says, the presidents formally asked the athletic directors to consider reducing not only the number of football players from 35 to 25 but also reducing recruits in other sports for which there had not been any previously set limits.

Currently, only men’s hockey, men’s basketball and football face restrictions on numbers of recruits.

Orleans says that the presidents, in submitting the agenda for possible reforms, did not question the basic Parry-Ryan framework, but rather asked—as Orleans summarized—“within that structure, what can we do additionally?”