Support Dartmouth College Aquatics Programs - Swimming and Diving and Water Polo

I urge you to reconsider your decision to cut the Dartmouth Swimming and Diving Teams. As a Princeton swimmer, I understand the kind of commitment these athletes are making and it would be unfair to rob them of their opportunity to represent your university as student-athletes. You are lucky to have some of the best student-athletes (http://www.cscaa.org/AATeams.cfm?div=1) in the country, and you are even luckier to have them still wanting to be at your institution after the way they have been treated in past weeks.

The fact that the sport they love is being taken away from these swimmers and divers is bad enough, but it is substantially worse that an institution that claims to pride itself on maintaining a meaningful dialogue with members of the university community, students in particular, made this decision in such an uninformed manner. It is reprehensible that members of the team were told to be at a meeting at nine in the morning a mere 52 minutes earlier, and with no consideration to the fact that they were holding practice at the same time. It is even more reprehensible that this decision was made with absolutely no degree of input from the people who are going to be most affected.

As you know, this decision has generated an enormous amount of national publicity, the vast majority of which is for the saving of the swimming and diving teams. For a mere 212,000 dollars per year that Dartmouth is saving (approximately one ten-thousandth of the endowment), the University is losing face in the eyes of thousands of people across the country, and deservedly so. Let me remind you that the swimmers and divers of Dartmouth University were not to my knowledge the people handling the endowment (which still stands at some 2 billion dollars, an absurd amount for financial considerations to be cited as the sole justification for cutting the swimming programs), and therefore it is not the swimmers who should be punished for the recent 5.7% setback to the University's financial status.

I remember swimming against the Dartmouth Swimming and Diving Team at Denunzio Pool in Princeton last year, and I have nothing but positive things to say about the teams. Their overall attitude was outstanding, and it was clear that all of the swimmers and divers had a love for their respective sports that should not be denied them by the institution to which they are paying 36,000 dollars per year. In the nationally broadcast words of Jenny Kunkel, one of your budget cuts, "love the college, hate the institution."

P.S. To the Dartmouth swimmers and divers, we'll see you on January 26th in New Hampshire and hopefully back in Princeton the following year. Best of luck in your quest to convince the the "institution" of their ignorance.