THE EVIL THAT IS FOOTBALL

The great fanfare of the college football season is at an end. The last frantic exhortation of cheer-leaders has died away. Teams have disbanded and broken training. Players are once more men and fellow students. And as the fever passes, the delirium ends, and normal sanity returns. Now in cool and balanced judgment we can look at football and see it as it is. The spell is broken.

Looking back upon it, the past season in college football was, indeed, a notable one--not so much for the upsets which have received such lengthy notice in the press, but rather for other and more significant developments, fore-shadowing the future. Never before has football as a spectacle been so popular. Never has the general public been so insatiable. Never have gate receipts mounted so high. Never have the colleges posed before the public in a role so strikingly false.

Had college presidents of fifty years ago foreseen that baby football would develop to so huge a monster, it is certain they would have nursed him with some alarm. Had they foreseen that a part of their educational system was to grow, and swell, and put on airs until it became bigger than the whole, they would have taken due precautions to keep the usurper in his place. But they did not see. And in consequence, college football has now reached the point where many persons worship it as the acme of college purpose, as the sole standard of the merit of colleges.

What comforts it to say that these are unthinking people? The great masses of men are always unthinking. That does not mitigate the evil. It constitutes part of the evil, to be sure, but that part against which least can be done directly in the way of remedy. The real offenders are the colleges themselves. Little by little, they have nourished, pampered, milk-fed their lusty infant until--lo! the child is stronger than the parent and threatens to reverse the normal order and rule the household.

But while the past season has exalted college football to new glories, it, has also done something in the opposite direction. From the very magnitude of the evil has sprung a reaction. Numerous indications show that in many colleges many students--both players and non-players--are renouncing the foolish idolatry of the game, and no longer worship in abject humility before the jealous gods of football. This reaction is especially strong at Harvard.

Representing this point of view, the CRIMSON advocates a return to reason. What if the public clamors for its spectacles? Let it clamor! That is not the affair of the college. The mushroom growth of professional teams all over the country is an answer to the public cry. May they multiply and grow strong! Our primary concern, however, is not for the professionals. The present evil of football is in its overemphasis in the college. It is in the college, therefore, that remedies must be sought and found.

It should be pointed out that there is no inherent antagonism between athletic and academic activities. We also want to make it perfectly clear that this editorial is not directed against football as a game, nor against students who play football. It is in the interest of those who wish really to "play" the game that the CRIMSON takes this stand against the overemphasis of football which has changed the game from a sport to a business, and a public utility into the bargain. The real issue is whether American colleges shall remain colleges in the older meaning of the word, or whether they shall cease to be such, to become the modern counterpart of the Roman circus as dispensers of spectacular entertainment to the public. Woodrow Wilson once said with truth that athletics were the "side shows of academic life". Today football tends to become the main show. Good sense calls loudly for a return to proper relations between football and scholarship at Harvard.

Tomorrow the CRIMSON will publish definite proposals with this end in view.