Lewis says he agrees with the objective behind the rule—student-athletes who contribute in other ways to the campus community are “the ideal,” he says—but has criticized its implementation.

Jane E. Humphries ’03, captain of the swimming and diving team and one of three student representatives on the Athletics Committee, wrote in an e-mail to Lewis and Scalise that the rule implied a dissatisfaction with athletes’ academic work—an insinuation she says she found “a bit insulting.” Lewis, she says, was very responsive.

Humphries says she supports the motion Lewis introduced to the league to distribute the 42 days of the rest period over the course of the year—a proposal that he says would better achieve balance between academics and athletics.

“We should teach not only that various pursuits should be valued by each student, but should teach that in living their daily lives, those pursuits should come into a natural rhythm, not yo-yoing in importance between extremes of total commitment and total abstinence,” Lewis wrote in an October memo to other Ivy League policy makers.

But while Lewis may often have been Harvard athletic’s biggest supporter among College administrators, he also says he believes that athletics in the College should observe limits.

A Matter of Good and Evil

Just down the wall from the hockey team picture there is a shot of a marching band on the 50-yd. line, in the formation of the Harvard “H.” But the field is in Ann Arbor, not Cambridge, and the band is wearing Michigan blue and gold, not Harvard Crimson. The picture was taken November 7, 1942, the last time Harvard played the Wolverines in football.

“I call this photo the parting of the ways in intercollegiate athletics, between the way of good and the way of evil,” Lewis says.

Lewis decries the “excesses” of many teams in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which he says include “absurd compromises of academic standards, scandalously low graduation rates and athletic participation becoming essentially a full-time job.”

There are two competing trends in college sports, Lewis says: the tendency towards increased professionalization, and the effort—partly a response to the first—to decrease the intensity of college athletics.

“Over the years the excesses got worse in the NCAA, and the Ivy League got pulled along,” Lewis says. “Several steps behind, but...these things only went in one direction. Some of the intensity-decreasing sentiment comes from a feeling that all of that went too far.”

Lewis says he agrees with the efforts to reduce intensity, but emphasizes that he is “not an absolutist” on this issue.

“I also do agree that it’s a good thing, where we can, to occasionally have the opportunity to have national visibility,” Lewis says.

For many teams, that isn’t the objective. Football, for example, generally aims for the glory of winning the Ivy title.

“If not just beating Yale,” Lewis quips.