Let’s Call The Harvard ‘Scouting Report’ Violence, Because That’s What It Is

By Shireen Ahmed

Another day, another crushing blow to our faltering faith in humanity.

In the wake of discovering a detailed “scouting report” penned by the 2012 male soccer team, which describes freshmen female soccer players in demeaning, derogatory, and explicit language — “Yeah . . . She wants cock” is a particularly charming epithet in its pages — Harvard has canceled the men’s remaining 2016 season.

It seems this kind of clandestine “scouting” is not a dark relic of the past, but continues to plague the school today. Last Tuesday, The Harvard Crimson published a piece detailing the abuses that persist within the Harvard Athletics system:

“The ‘report’ appears to have been an annual practice. At the beginning of the document, the author writes that ‘while some of the scouting report last year was wrong, the overall consensus that’ a certain player ‘was both the hottest and the most STD ridden was confirmed.’”

Harvard Athletics Director Bob Scalise confirmed the presence of this report, calling the misogyny “widespread across the team,” in an email penned to student athletes. The realization that this was not an isolated incident but a bastardized tradition is what spurned the cancellation.