To the Editor:

I spent Saturday evening standing directly behind the Yale student section. Yale played a great game and deserved to win the basketball game. The Yale coaching staff have assembled an excellent group of players who may well bring Yale its first Ivy Championship since 1962. But the Yale basketball team deserves a student body of which it can be proud.

All of us have grown accustomed to cheers involving the word “suck” in various formulations. One cringes, however, to hear cheers such as “Off your knees ref you’re blowing the game” or, even worse, “I f—-d your mom.”

The referees did an an excellent job. As to the second cheer quoted above, sheer offensiveness for its own sake would appear to be its only purpose. The claim, if true, denies Yale’s female students an opportunity for equal participation. This is the sort of thing one might expect to encounter in the Palestra.

C. Thomas Corwin

February 10, 2002

The writer is a graduate of Princeton’s Class of 1962.