"FOOTBALL MUST KEEP ITS PLACE IN COLLEGE LIFE"

I believe it is fair to say that many college presidents are worrying over the athletic situation in their respective colleges. This does not mean that they are opposed to athletics. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, we are inclined to be too enthusiastic. When our team makes a touchdown our behavior is not to be distinguished from that of any other academic lunatic. But when we get back to our right minds and begin to count the cost there is apt to be a bad quarter of an hour.

There is one question which the colleges and all who have their best interests at heart may well consider and that is the high cost of football victories. I mean not only the cost in money but in the surrender of the higher academic interests, not to mention the surrender of moral principles. I speak of football because it is the one distinctively college sport and the one which arouses the greatest enthusiasm. The more reason, therefore, that we should keep it scrupulously free from every hint or suspicion of professionalism. We cannot say that this is so. Not a few of the most successful teams may be fairly described as technically within the law but grossly violating the spirit of college sport. The temptation has been too strong.

One of the present dangers of college athletics is a tendency to make it the main advertising medium of the college. The measure of the football team is made the measure of the college. It is even played up in endowment campaigns as a ruling motive in the appeal for support. Stripped of all its camouflage the proposition is simply this: The college wants money; if we can put together a winning football team it will help to get it. The alumni want the college to win and are willing to pay to see it win. Then follows what we are all familiar with--the scouting, the persuading, the proselyting, the indirect buying, which is so common that we are no longer disturbed, by it. It becomes then not a competition in football but a competition in scouting where money talks.

To the innocent mind it is a matter of wonder how a college of two or three hundred can send a team which can defeat a university of four or five thousand without paying a price which no institution dedicated to learning has a right to pay. An editorial recently appeared in one of our metropolitan dailies entitled. "Football as a national sport." Professional baseball is a national sport and one which we all enjoy. It is a commercial enterprise perfectly legitimate and calling for no defense. If football is to be a national sport in any such sense let it be so and let it be put frankly on a professional basis as it is in Great Britain. But that the public shall demand that the colleges shall turn aside from the purposes for which they were founded and shall make expensive sacrifices of the time and energy of their students and of their intellectual interests to provide a Roman holiday for the sport loving public is something which the public has no right to demand and which no self-respecting college has the right to consent to.

The answer we should make to the general public is this: You are putting too heavy a strain upon us. You are asking of us more than you have the right to ask and more than we have the right to give, and you are subjecting the young men in our colleges and the boys in our schools to a temptation which they ought not to have to bear and which is good neither for them nor for the colleges.

Football has a place and an important place in school and college life. We must see that it is kept in its place. Above all, the lovers of the game must see to it that a good clean sport shall not be open to the suspicion of becoming a semi-professional business.

Success is the gospel of the hour and a very dangerous gospel it is. But every honorable man knows that success is often purchased at a price that leaves a man a moral bankrupt. This happens in football as in everything else and to colleges as well as to men. Some victories reflect discredit and not credit upon the college that wins them. Pressure is sometimes brought to bear upon the heads of colleges to silently acquiesce in this kind of athletic efficiency, or at least to turn a blind eye to methods which they know are ignoble. It is to their credit that most of them have sense enough as well as courage enough to stand against it. We believe the great body of alumni will approve this stand and that it will also have the approval of all the lovers of clean sport whose good opinion is worth having