Naughty! Naughty!

A development even more sinister than the external aspects of commercialism in intercollegiate sport, and at the same time an apparent offshoot of them, is the gradual change in the psychological attitude of the undergraduate toward those mores that once were considered the essentials of good sportsmanship. If this phenomenon were evidenced only at Princeton in such recent unpleasant flurries of booing as at the Yale hockey game and the Penn basketball game, we might possibly have regarded it as a momentary and localized lapse from gentlemanly conduct which would not soon recur. But with disturbing remembrance of similar demonstrations at baseball games last spring suddenly came a shower of editorial comment from our contemporaries, which aroused us to a realization that this "lapse" is widespread. At Oregon University, Yale, Brown, Columbia and numerous others, undergraduate and alumni editors are "viewing with alarm." So far, they too seem to have considered the bad manners to be mere passing clouds, but we are inclined to wonder.

It seems to us, as we reflect, that this tendency for rooters mutually to disregard the old standards of sportsmanlike conduct is to a large degree caused by the professionalism which has become so integral a part of American sport. The average undergraduate spectator is not now dependent on intercollegiate athletes for his sport spectacles. A tremendous growth of professional teams of high excellence has colored the college rooter's judgment of his teams with standards of professional excellence. Together with high prices of admission levied for virtually all intercollegiate contests of importance, this has engendered a feeling that the athletes are in certain measure apart from the rest of the undergraduate body. More than an exhibition of grit and spirit is now expected by the student spectator, who feels that the purchase of a ticket guarantees him a spectacle with the players as performers.

Another factor in the new attitude has been the sweeping undergraduate reaction which has followed on the heels of the "rah-rah collegiatism" produced in the middle of the post-war decade. Because sentimentalists and publicists seized and exploited the traditional forms of sportsmanship, it too has been driven to cover by the current wave of disgust at all the lack of restraint that the word "Collegiate" now implies.

That this reactionary flood should have swept away the old sportsmanship is to be deplored, but because it is an extreme swing of the pendulum, we sincerely, trust that it will not be long before the formerly cherished standards return. Certainly at Princeton, the professionalized attitude toward teams seems distinctly out of place and unwarranted, despite the trend of the times. It is not too much to suppose that Princeton spectators are still innately gentlemen and, as gentlemen, sportsmen in the finest meaning of the word. --Dally Princetonian.