SUBJECTIVE REASONING

The Michigain Daily, commenting on the choice of a neutral party to select officials for the Harvard-Yale football game, says that this step, coupled with such a one as the formation in recent years of an eastern basketball league, "shows a tendency towards a single goal-an eastern conference". Such an organization would, according to the Daily, perform the same function as the Big Ten Conference; its power would eventually become as great and its unity as strong.

The effects of a conference whose grasp has the octopus-like extension of the Big Ten can have only a retarding action on the present movement in the larger eastern colleges, as typified by President Hopkins' proposal to the Dartmouth association and by the strong undergraduate feeling against commercialization of the game. Conference upholders will deny this vehemently, but , both benefits and evils alike, even they must admit that the Daily errs in its supposition that selection of an outside man to govern the refereeing in this one game is in any way an indication of a conference spirit. The plan is, if properly analyzed, in exact coordination with the objectives of football reform and is therefore antipathetic toward anything which would tend to increase the importance of intercollegiate football, already a giant in all parts of the country, as opposed to intramural.

The reasons for which Harvard, Yale and Princeton have failed to join in any Eastern "Big Ten" which might be formed are obviously not those of "a sort of superficial snobbery" as the Daily states. To accept such a presumption is to ignore entirely the whole shift in undergraduate attitude toward football and to base futile arguments on a threadbare theme. The Eastern Conference idea is acceptable and conceivable only in the degree in which it supports the recent rationalization of the sport. Certainly the Present regime of the western body is not toward that end. Or, if it is, its altruism is well concealed behind its elephantine proportions.