One Game a Year

To reduce Harvard's inter-collegiate athletic contests to one game per year in each of the major sports is President A. Lawrence Lowell's conception of good sense, and it appears to be such good sense that one wonders why he has kept it to himself so long. College athletics are in a ferment now, if one look to the press, but if one centers one's eyes on the universities, one sees authorities that refuse to look beyond their money-bags, meanwhile mumbling that all is well.

If figures are correct, almost one-fourth of our national income is spent in recreation. We spend it in hot-dogs, automobiles, movies, road-houses and restless movement; one of the largest items is the two-hour vigil at the shrine of football on autumnal Saturdays. The play we love with such spirit is often mechanical play. It is play where we sit huddled close together in darkened auditoriums watching a small lighted space where two figures pound or hug each other. We watch, but we do not play.

Perhaps the Harvard president is a little radical in the limits he would place on college athletics, but he voices a protest to the over emphasis of sports for gate receipts that is worthy of careful consideration by every university in this country. William Howard Taft, a young man, has also recently taken a public stand against commercialism in college athletics. He laments the fact that so many men are sacrificing educational advantages by alloting too much of their time to sports. Daily Northwestern.