The Ivy Dilemma
Unfortunately, while the acounts I've linked of the Penn women swimmers' dilemma outline their near-impossible choices very clearly, my sympathy extends only so far. The conventional wisdom is that the swimmers are being denied the chance to compete fairly in women's competitions by allowing a male swimmer to skew the results, and on top of that, they're being subjected to sexual harassment when the male exposes his genitals in the women's locker room. But if they complain -- indeed, if they go even so far as to report the indecent exposure to law enforcement or follow policy and complain to the campus sexual harassment coordinator -- they face loss of scholarship, dismissal from the team, and loss of future career prospects. But this is simply a microcosm of the larger Ivy dilemma, which has been around since the late 1940s when the Ivies became selective and at least in theory "meritocratic". At least, David Brooks thinks that way. The more or less d...