Intramural Sports Participant Spencer Lenfield Wins Rhodes Scholarship

By David Tannenwald

            November 19, 2011 was an exceptionally good day for Harvard student-athletes.  In New Haven, CT, the football team defeated Yale by 38 points to finish the Ivy League season undefeated and claim its fifth straight victory in “The Game.”  On the opposite side of the country in Los Angeles, CA, the men’s basketball team pushed its record to 3-0 with a 77-67 victory over Loyola Marymount University.  While the basketball and football teams exploits are well-documented, a less heralded Crimson student-athlete, Spencer Lenfield, may have scored the most impressive victory of the day in Chicago, IL: he won a Rhodes Scholarship.

            Lenfield, a senior from Paw Paw, MI who is a History and Literature concentrator, has enjoyed an exceptional Harvard career.  According to his biography on the Rhodes website, he has won academic prizes for his work on Flaubert and Virginia Woolf.  Outside of the classroom, he has written prolifically, publishing over a dozen articles in Harvard Magazine, serving as Editor-in-Chief of Tuesday Magazine, and penning an arts column for The Harvard Crimson.  Additionally, he is an integral member of the community in his residential college, Eliot House, where it is common to find Spencer playing the piano in the dining hall and asking insightful questions at Senior Common Room talks.

This past fall, Lenfield played on the Eliot intramural soccer team, which placed second to Dunster House in intramural competition.  For Lenfield, who also competed in intramural soccer for Matthews Hall as a freshman and enjoys running in the MAC and biking around Cambridge, intramurals have served as a “a great way to get to know people [he] wouldn’t get to know otherwise,” and, in his view, they illustrate the benefits that accrue when students heavily invest themselves in a house activity.

Next fall, Lenfield will take his considerable talents to Oxford University where he is planning to do an M.Litt. in history at Oxford and will undoubtedly make substantial contributions to the community’s academic, literary, musical, and social scenes.  On behalf of the recreational sports program, congratulations to Spencer on winning a Rhodes Scholarship, and we hope to see you on the soccer field again in the spring.