Malcolm Gladwell Taking Shots At Harvard Athletes Has Me At My Tipping Point

Cindy Barrymore. Shutterstock Images.

Malcolm Gladwell appears to be pitching his new book: The three ways to get into Harvard if you're not very smart. The editors suggested a more honest title: How to diminish the achievements of accepted Harvard students from the bitter perspective of a nerd who didn't get in. But Malcolm summarily dismissed this title, fired the editors, and then researched their families en route to writing a column in The New Yorker about how the vast majority of book publishers are actually alcoholics, drug abusers, and sadomasochistic monsters.

If there is a smugger, shmarmier, more self-important person on earth than Malcolm Gladwell, I'm yet to see him/her/them/zirs.  

In all likelihood, this will be a book that scours the data of various Harvard students, finding trends that show some tenuous correlation between average family income and grade point average. He'll then say that the entire hockey team was born between Thanksgiving and New Years Eve, giving them an extra 10-ish months to develop the proper testosterone levels needed to matriculate as 22-year-old freshmen. They'll do their years in junior hockey, living at homestays on farms in the Dakotas and western Pennsylvania, where their daily chore of milking goats somehow helped develop their upper delts in a way that non-athletic regular persons did not. This will be their advantage, their privilege, that gets them a spot at Harvard instead of the kid who forged a harpsichord from a scrapyard in Malaysia and taught himself to play music with a mastery not heard since Johann Sebastien Bach himself. 

And because they're all white, it's a hate crime against humanity. 

Look, there are a couple sports at Harvard that would make any inner-city pickup hooper like myself roll his eyes. Sports like rowing, fencing, sailing, water polo, and squash are certainly not sports that can be played at charter schools or in districts with limited athletic budgets like, say, the Mississippi Delta. But as long as the Olympics continue to feature (most) of these sports, we're going to need collegiate programs to mold those future olympians into champions so that we keep beating China in the medal count. And if the Ivy League schools are the only ones who can actually fund these preposterous "sports," it remains our American duty to do so. 

I won't get in to the fact that athletes at Harvard are actually disadvantaged when it comes to academic performance. At major athletic powerhouses like UNC, UVA, Duke, etc., student-athletes are often given first pick of classes to take, before enrollment is opened up to the NARPs, because these schools believe that their athletes have less time, less schedule flexibility, to work in their classes. 

Not Harvard though. God, can you imagine if I went to the Dean Khurana and lobbied him for special treatment in choosing my classes because I have 6AM lifting and conditioning sessions and can't get back across the river until 9:30, at which point I have to wolf down some shitty dining hall food just to replace the caloric tax I just paid by puking into a trash can after the beep test, and thus I can't start classes until 10AM, so I should get first dibs on 10AM classes? If I know Dean Khurana, the Dean of Harvard College, as well as I think I do, he'd be laugh me straight out of his sunlit office, following me through the yard and past Widener Library all the way out to Mass Ave to find sanctuary in my final club—the one place where Harvard athletes find any respect these days. 

Full-disclosure, I've never read a single book written by Malcolm Gladwell. Why? Because Lebron pretends to read them before games. Any book that Lebron hires a photographer to take a picture of him reading is immediately placed on my "do not read" list. For those are not books; they are props.