Re: Ivy League Schools

mbphilp · Sat, 14 Apr 2001 21:42:49 -0700

Being the President of Dartmouth College Bowl, I
wanted to voice my opinion here:

I completely
agree with what has previously been stated here, mainly
that:

1. The top students at many non-Ivy schools can
match those of Ivy League Schools. There are a variety
of reasons why people might not go to any Ivy League
school, but be extremely qualified to do so.

2.
There are an abundance of other activities here that
often take away some of the best college bowlers. The
team that continually wins the campus intramural
tournament (which college bowl helps run) has a player on
it, that's as good if not better than our top
players. Yet he's involved in other things and has never
competed for us nor come to a practice.

3. Good
college bowlers are not always good in their academic
fields. My college bowl skills (and most of my teammates)
have very little to do with my major and instead are
from other sources. This is true for a great deal of
people on the team. Classroom success is not indicative
of college bowl success, nor vice versa.

4.
Strength of club is often based on their reputation and
thus tend to keep getting good players. At Dartmouth,
members of our student activities council, while always
being very supportive, thought for a good deal of time
that we were the college's bowling team (I am not
making this up.) I'm sure there are many people on
campus that, despite our attempts at publicity, do not
know that we exist, and might get inovlved if they
did.

The only additional factor I would tack on is that
not all Ivy League schools are created equal. The
additional tournament time commitment (two hours minimum
drive each way), the fact that we have a very small
graduate school and no graduate student players, and the
fact that Dartmouth is for the most part not a
research university and thus has a different mentality,
are factors that make us different than other Ivy
League schools. These are not meant to be excuses by any
means, but rather descriptions of why one can't
generalize with "the Ivy League". The creation of the Ivy
League was solely for athletic purposes and has since
expanded its boundaries in ways that have been
misleading.

As always, my opinion does not necessarily reflect
those of the rest of my team or its alumni, although
I'd be interested to hear what Tim Young has to say
on this topic...

Michael Philpy
Dartmouth
College Bowl President