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Egg in Your Beer

By Richard E. Ashcraft

Last year $70 of every student's tuition went to the H.A.A. to defray the $300,000 deficit it accumulated.

Right now the H.A.A. and the University with it is saddled with a huge plant, built in the lush days of the twenties when the H.A.A. reaped a profit of over $1,000,000 per year and the stadium was jammed even for a trackmeet.

Tht same stadium developed structural weaknesses during the past summer and had to be repaired at great expense, despite the fact that so big a stadium is no longer needed. But it was just as one University Hall man said, "What could we have done, give it away?"

The same principal applies to other physical burdens of the H.A.A. Judgment demands that despite whatever useful purposes certain items in the plant might have, the H.A.A. would do well to function without them, just for the sake of economy. But items like the Weld Boathouse, while expendable in a pinch, are tough to get rid of.

Financing athletics isn't problem peculiar to Harvard. In the Ivy League only cornell and Princeton achieved solvency in their athletic programs last year and a CRIMSON survey made a year ago showed that universities all over the country were losing on sports unless they were biggest big time. Of course Harvard has been losing far more than any of the others and this indicates that Tom Bolles would be well advised to apply Hoover Commission tactics to his vast domain.

Bill Bingham, the ex Athletic Director, as late as last winter dreamed of seeing the stadium so filled that speculators would again be a problem. But this isn't likely to happen until American youth returns to the values of the 1920's, T.V. becomes a lost science, and other sports die.

No matter how many economies the H.A.A. effects, and it may have to take drastic steps, it will still probably be in difficulty. What might happen then is that a levy to support the H.A.A. will be reckoned into a new, higher tuition for all students. In return for his money, the student would get a participation ticket and an annual ticket booklet "free."

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