FOOTBALL TALK--AD ABSURDUM

Mr. Francis Wallace, a sport writer on the staff of the New York Evening Post, accuses college faculties rather broadly of insincerity, in his article, "The Hypocrisy of Football Reform," printed in the current issue of Scribner's magazine. In doing so he indulges in some surprising bits of reasoning which might bear a more detailed inspection before accepting his major charge,--hypocrisy among the leaders of American education.

His thesis may be summed up briefly by a mental picture of a college president with one hand raised to high heaven as he exhorts the gods of football reform, and the other extended behind his back to gather in the gate receipts of the fall gridiron season. It is quite possible that this picture has a casual counterpart in reality viewed the length and breadth of the land. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Wallace has chosen to illustrate his attitude with the names of President Lowell of Harvard and President Hopkins of Dartmouth. Without losing any character as a potential invader of the sacrosanct, the writer might have made less of a tactical blunder in this first choice.

The real criticism of Mr. Wallace's article is reserved for his reductio ad absurdum method used in his summing up arguments. He suggests that three courses are open to the colleges. Either they can pick, what he calls the shortest distance between two points, and wipe out the commercialism of football reducing it to a pure amateur condition like rowing; or they can "frankly admit that the gridiron game has grown beyond the borders of amateurism and that the growth has been healthy"; or "the faculties can, until the stadiums are cleared of debt, continue to wade in the mud of their own mixing while prating in generalities of an outworn ideal; to preach against bootlegging while collecting the profits; and to shout at athletic revival meetings while living in sin."

The absurdity is patent. His first suggestion is consciously ridiculous, and has been recognized as such by everyone. Football pays for the other sports and until something can be substituted for gate receipts in the way of an athletic endowment, colleges will continue to accommodate Mr. Wallace's "public" in stadia of increasing proportions. His alternatives for this impossible position are useful for the sake of his argument, but hardly consecutive. If one were convinced of Mr. Wallace's own sincerity in advancing the first course of action, one might call him a "direct actionist". There is a medium of slow and intelligent football reform between the first and second choices; the third may be discarded for lack of substantiating argument.