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The Times' "Editorial Notebook" section is the box on its Op-Ed page that invariably contains a pointless, grating rumination about life on the farm in Connecticut or something equally inapplicable to NYC life, written by someone who should be unemployed but is, instead, rich and a member of the Times editorial board. Today the section offers the opinions of a Harvard man. Kudos to the Times for luring an Ivy Leaguer into the dirty, ink-stained corridors of journalism! So what important topic is Philip M. Boffey, '58, so eager to explain to the nation? Harvard, of course!

Boffey has some meandering thoughts about Harvard's basketball team, a matter of frequent conversation among the citizens of America at large. He was inspired to turn his attention to the topic by an article about the Harvard basketball team that he saw—astoundingly—in the Times. Synergy! Seems that Boffey is confused by the Byzantine regulations governing college athletic recruiting standards. "Just trying to figure out how those standards are set seems to require a Ph.D in mathematics," he says.

From Harvard, no doubt!


Ivy League rules say that each individual athlete recruited must score above a minimum "academic index" (derived from standardized test scores and class rank) and that the athletes recruited in all sports (except football, which has separate, equally baffling rules) must have an average index that falls within "one standard deviation" of the school's entire student body.

Got all that?

Yes. The average athlete academic index has to be within one standard deviation of the school's average. Sucks that the Harvard-educated science specialist on the Times editorial board would have so much trouble with it. Oh well, '58 was before they had calculators and shit.

Harvard!