Trail Blazers

The Carnegie Foundation's report on "American College Athletics", which became public yesterday, contains illuminating information for those unfamiliar with the college scene, yet for those who have followed the evolution of intercollegiate football into the realm of big business, its findings are far from being startling. The yard-stick of evaluation when applied to the sport from a national aspect measures out a sickening tale, as the fact that a "pure" rating was given only twenty-eight colleges out of a possible one hundred and twelve attests. That this was stressed at the expense of a more vivid picturization of sectional and local conditions, however, enhances the possibility of creating a distorted cycloramic concept of the situation.

The report attempts the impossible in its striving for generalizations on football. Its attendant evils are largely endemic throughout the East, yet we are fully aware that the Middle and Far West have gone berserk over the sport. The futility of classifying Harvard and Princeton in the motley group of colleges and universities guilty of proselyting and commercialism is a case in point. It is regrettable that these two universities have been denied the first flush of exoneration that it was Yale's good fortune to receive, but their convincing refutation of the charges which were leveled against them, the one the words of President Hibben and Coach Roper, the other a statement from Director of Athletics Bingham at Harvard, make the initial charge seem somewhat meaningless. The glow of pride that once quickened Harvard, Princeton and Yale hearts when football supremacy rested among the trio may well be transferred into vicarious satisfaction that their ethics are still the index for those who would adhere to the spirit of the amateur. Not one, but three, may raise their heads and walk proudly among the colleges. There is little fear that the major ills of which the Carnegie report treats will become epidemic. They have long been rampant, and the cycle points downward. Misapprehension that the frontier football spirit will ricochet back to the Eastern seaboard is not so much the belief of intelligent students of the game, as that the Eastern attitude may soon go West. The trail has already been blazed, and while older institutions of higher learning continue to rigidly interpret the amateur code for the hopeful edification of their erring brothers, an amazingly human populace insists on taking its education and its play in equal proportions. Yale News