PIGSKIN COMMON

In its current issue, the New Republic turns from the crying evils of Wall Street and the White House, and discusses with the same merry gusto the crying evils of the football field. In a long editorial captioned "Pigskin Preferred", reprinted elsewhere in this mornings CRIMSON, the editors discuss with mock seriousness the increasing emphasis which is being placed on football in general, and Harvard football in particular, ending with the solemn proposal that college football teams be placed on a truly business-like basis by the formation of stock companies, organized to manipulate the interests of college football teams in such a way as will best insure profitable dividends to the alumni stockholders, with perhaps an occasional bonus to the college which makes all this exploitation possible.

The editors of the New Republic choose to be satirical. But the Editors of the CRIMSON find it possible to take from their satire a serious suggestion for the solutions of the problems of college football. Complaints against the over-emphasis upon college football have been increasing in volume during the past few years, and bid fair to increase as long as interest in football continues to cast into eclipse all other legitimate interests of college.

Relatively small at the same time are the complaints against over-emphasis upon college baseball, because amateur baseball has been kept in proper relation to the other aspects of college life by the dwarfing presence of professional baseball. During the fall season, no such saving counter-attraction has existed. But at last professional football teams have begun to appear. And their growth should be encouraged rather than frowned upon. For only when football teams legitimately professional come to occupy the same space in the public prints and the same interest in the public mind as is now held by professional baseball, will the college football teams of the country be able to return to the comparative privacy of friendly, amateur competition which the college baseball enjoys.

If the editors of the New Republic are interested in remedying a situation admittedly evil, rather than, as we suspect, in merely talking about it, they will float their bond issues and subscribe their dollars for the exploitation of a professional, and not a college, football team.