Soaking Up the Bennies

It's hard to describe the depression that came over me when I read it. I've been so loyal for so long, though it is true that I've been out of college only five years. That's why the pieces of it are spread all over the floor; the pieces of Harvard's 1976 football schedule.

Sure, nothing ever stays the same; my liberal arts education taught me that much. That's why some years we'd play Holy Cross and perhaps Bucknell, and then the next fall we'd take on B.U. and UMass. Fine, I'm all for it. But this wholesale reshuffling is going too far. The nearly perfect alphabetical order of ivy opponents has been obliterated, the two Southern schools (Penn and Princeton) both play in Cambridge in odd-numbered years, and we're being asked to play a league opponent, albeit Columbia, before getting a chance to polish skills against two non-league teams. It's hard to say which of these developments is the worst.

For students, no doubt these changes will cause about as much outrage as would the dissappearance from House dining halls of Cap'n Crunch, but for those of us out here in Alumniland, it's all we have left. We could judge the approach of winter by how far along we were in the alphabet. Now we must revert to the calendar. And we shall be forced, like everyone else, to consult a schedule to find out which game is next--a particularly undesirable development in view of the condition of my own schedule.

Nor will students--and many other fans, for that matter--be aroused by the fact that every other year those of us south of the New Jersey Turnpike will have to travel to Baker Field to see the multiflex offense. In the past we could go to Philadelphia one year and Old Nassau the next.

As for starting our season against Columbia, this may be fine for some of the teams in the league, but it seems like a major mistake for us to take such a step. True, at least it's not Dartmouth we're talking about, but someday Marty Domres Jr. is going to come along, and we're going to wish we had the Terriers and the Redmen to fatten up on first. As J. Bennington Peers would agree, it's okay to lose to those teams because they're not really of any account.

I'm well aware that alumni often are viewed as meddlers with skewed senses of priorities. Some suggest that we tend to resist change. Yet these critics ignore the fact that alumni have adjusted well to the forward pass, which is now cause of only occasional grumbling at Yale Game tailgates. But with these schedule changes, the administration is pushing us too far.

Particularly galling is the fact that this schedule was dumped in our laps with no effort at soliciting our input. Surely, if we are given the opportunity each year to vote on Harvard's Overseers, we should be given a chance to veto any scrambling of the football schedule. There can be no question about which matter is more important to alumni.

It may be that those responsible for this heresy are now sitting back comfortably at 60 Boylston St. and elsewhere in the belief that they've finalized changes before we had a chance to speak up. But who, I wonder, will the laugh be on when the dollars stop flowing in and instead of olympic swimming pools and shiny hockey rinks down at Soldiers Field there will be nothing but 57 tetherball polies--and no tetherballs.