COMMENT

Only an ironist could describe football under the Haughton system as a sport. It is a learned profession, a vocation in the religious sense, a life work compressed into the space of three years. Its practitioners are vowed to poverty, celibacy, obedience and hard work. They sacrifice their personal comfort for a remote and dubious objective, hard to attain, dimly understood, and of more or less speculative value. It is a form of monasticism, a rejection of the world for the edification of the spirt. From this standpoint, the employment of Mr. Haughton at Columbia ought to be regarded as a happy taken of the increase of spirituality in our universities. It would be a mistake to think of it as a concession to the spirit of materialism, to which these mighty stadium-cathedrals are being erected all over the country. This reproach can be leveled at other great men of football, perhaps; and it any one of them had come here we might perhaps be justified in saying that for all Columbia's great graduate and professional schools, for all its fifty or a hundred thousand Summer and extension-sion students, its executives and students felt that it wasn't a big league university without a football team.

No such feeble taunt can be flung at Percy Haughton's kind of football. His advent means that a number of Columbia's young men are going to submit to iron discipline, to a harsh cenobitic rule, for the upbuilding of the corporate over-soul. That is a fine thing in this selfish age. New York Times.