Two days after Harvard's men's soccer team was suspended for the rest of its season for creating lewd "scouting reports" about members of the women's soccer team, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper has reported that another men's athletic program at the university made lewd comments about its female counterparts.
According to The Crimson, the men's cross country team created yearly spreadsheets ahead of an annual dance with the women's team. In the spreadsheets, the men guessed which women would invite certain men to the dance, the report said, and some of the spreadsheets included comments, some "sexually explicit," about the women's physical appearance.
The Crimson report cited a spreadsheet from 2012 that contained "specific comments about girls weight or appearance."
Brandon E. Price, the men's cross country captain, told The Crimson he emailed members of the team Saturday afternoon asking the team to "come clean with anything that we have typed down in the past." In the email, Price said he had shared a document that "contains sexually explicit content about the girls' team" with the team's coach, Jason S. Saretsky.
"We don't want the school to find this, without us first bringing it to them," Price wrote in the email. "The problem with the Men's Soccer team was they tried to hide their stuff."
Price told The Crimson that the team was "particularly ashamed of" the 2014 spreadsheet, but he noted that the team's culture is now different.
"We have really changed the team culture since then, and now the spreadsheet is clean and we try to refrain from making comments like that," Price said.
In a statement about The Crimson's report on the cross country team Saturday evening, Harvard athletic director Robert L. Scalise said, "Harvard Athletics does not tolerate this sort of demeaning and derogatory behavior, and we will address any credible information we receive."
Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard, said in a prepared statement that he did not know the details of the cross country spreadsheets.
"We must strive toward a culture and context of respect, dignity, and compassion -- and all of us have a role to play in that work," Khurana said.
The Crimson report comes just days after the Harvard men's soccer team received a season-ending suspension after an investigation found the team created "scouting reports" in which members of the women's soccer team were rated on their perceived sexual appeal and physical appearance.