Fact and Commont

College Spirit, spelled with capitals and thought of as an intangible something greatly to be desired, is sometimes a curse. While we are seeking it so diligently we often lose sight of the fact that it ceases to be a virture when improprieties and injustices can be committed under cover of its magic name. But leaving generalities aside, let's look the situation squarely in the face and find a few specific instances. Take the question of the night shirt parades. We have no objection to the parade. But when a reckless gang of paraders make an exuberance of College Spirit their excuse for robbing, rioting and pillaging they make fools of themselves and cast suspicion on their fellow students under the guise of institutional loyalty : when they paint the town red in a misdirected attempt to display their college pride, then we say College Spirit should have

some of its intoxicating ingredients extracted.

College Spirit is a curse when it prompts a student to stoop to any dishonorable act in order to uphold the prestige of his school. To place money on a game because of a misconceived idea that loyalty to team and college demands it, is a fatal error common among college men. Gambling on the athletic contest, even when prompted by an overflow of zeal, is an evil just the same as the game of chance conducted in a dive or den.

But it is a misconception of College Spirit that makes such unreasonable demands of the men wearing the institution's colors. Apply the test to athletics or what you will, College Spirit, truly interpreted, is just and sensible. The trouble is that "College Spirit" has become a mere catch phrase with which college students love to conjure. It is used as an excuse - an' apology for something that has no right to exist. There is a genuine College Spirit,-and it is a "consummation devoutly to be wished." It means real loyalty,-not vandalism. Love of institution that prompts sane, beneficial activity is what the term comprehends. In its truest sense, College Spirit expresses all that college life means to us. It is a crystalization of the undercurrent of the institution. It is the moving force.

(From The Texan).

What is an Amateur?

For two years the international amateur athletic federation has been working, through its committees, to compass some agreement satisfactory to all represented nations by which it could be settled, for a time at least, as to what divides amateur from professional athletic sports. Lacking such agreement, international competitions develop considerable friction. But given an accepted standard which is enforced, sports at once are braced up. For this reason then there will be public interest in the announcement that the committee, sitting at Lyons, France, has just come to an agreement, not differing much from that submitted to the federation congress in Berlin last year, but expressing the mature judgement of men representing six of the nations most given to sporting contests.

With the technical aspects of this decision the public is not so much concerned as it is with the results which will follow, if the committee's definitions are accepted by the federation and become binding. Vagueness of standard has made for laxity of conduct often. The surer athletes are that certain formally declared rules of classification cover cases of conduct that. Whenever noted, at once, automatically as it were, put the men out of the amatuer and into the professional class, and the surer they are that these rules will be enforced once they are officially announced, the move likelihood there is of conformity to the code of law and of honor.

New conditions under which competitive sports are carried on, added publicity that comes from journalistic emphasis on athletics as a source of news, the large pecuniary profits that may go with professionalism, the intense rivalries between communities and between educational institutions in support of their athletes' prowess, all these have had the effeet of making maintenance of amateur sport with its traditional indifference to monetary reward more difficult than if used to be. "Competition for the love of sport" is the essence of amateurism. According to the committee: and it is a form of competition that well wishers of athletes honor highly always.

(From the Christian Science Monitor)