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Poisoned Ivy? Littlefield Reflects On Recent Program Suspensions

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"Their targets? Women, gays, and blacks. The season there is done… // Suspended, halted, stopped, defunct. It’s race has now been run," Littlefield writes. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
"Their targets? Women, gays, and blacks. The season there is done… // Suspended, halted, stopped, defunct. It’s race has now been run," Littlefield writes. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The Harvard men played soccer, until suddenly they stopped.

The bubble of a season full of winning lately popped.

It ended prematurely. It turned out the Harvard men

Had rated Harvard women, and not just now and then.

Tradition can be swell, I guess, but it can also be

A nasty, witless practice in which men are feeling free

To mock the female players. They’d been doing that for years,

And now they’re sitting idle as their season disappears.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that we’ve also lately learned

That male athletes at Harvard aren’t alone in getting burned

For being unevolved. The wrestlers on Columbia’s team

Have also been sat down for language even more obscene…

Their targets? Women, gays, and blacks. The season there is done…

Suspended, halted, stopped, defunct. It’s race has now been run.

I wonder, given what we know, and what we’re bound to guess,

Which of the six remaining schools will next turn up a mess?

Beneath which Ivy leaf is ignorance at work, like rot,

About to be revealed to show us what we’ve really got

At still another hallowed hall where some, no doubt, believed

The best and brightest flourished. Hey, could be they were deceived.

If you’re the A.D. in New Haven or perhaps at Penn…

A coach employed at Princeton…are you worried, wond’ring when

The stupid texts will surface to bring down a season there?

At Dartmouth and Cornell, as well, are athletes now aware,

Resolving to erase the emails they have lately sent

And hoping they have been erased at places where they went?

Have laptops now gone dark at Brown? Has texting ended there?

And are the Ivies all alone in that sort of despair?

I think not, and I’m much inclined to take a risky flyer

And say the sexist, racist blather goes a little higher

Than even some of this grand country’s Ivy-covered halls…

I won’t fill in the name for you, ‘cause I don’t need the calls.

Headshot of Bill Littlefield

Bill Littlefield Host, Only A Game
Bill Littlefield was the host of Only A Game from 1993 until 2018.

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