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The following interesting editorial appeared in the Yale News for Saturday:
"A subject in connection with the late foot ball season, which at the time it did not seem well to criticise, but which from the importance of the principle it involved demands some serious comment and consideration was the foot ball agreement entered into with Harvard by the president and captain of the Yale team, as representing the university. The advisability of the agreement is not now the question; the point is as to the way in which it was made.
We have always understood that the men at the head of our athletic associations were merely the agents of the University, qualified to carry on all the executive business of the teams in whatever way seemed fit and to decide on all minor subjects of policy that came up, but certainly not empowered to make a definite and binding agreement on a question of such far-reaching importance as the five-year foot ball arrangement with Harvard. On questions that touch so nearly as this does the whole athletic interest of the University it has always been customary for the University to decide, and the manner in which the present agreement was made is, we think, a grave infraction of the powers delegated to our representatives, and a precedent too dangerous to be allowed to pass without comment.
Yale has always congratulated itself, and with good reason, on the freedom with which it has managed its athletics. We have here no Faculty or Alumni committee to complicate and harass our action, and hithertoo the subjects that interest the whole body of students have been decided by them in the way that to them seemed best.
This democratic power, that had, with few exceptions, been unquestioned up to the present year, the recent action of the foot ball officers seriously menaces. They undoubtedly acted in entire good faith, and, as they thought, for the best interests of the University, but nevertheless the results of this agency were, we believe, illegitimate, and under the custom of the Yale athletic system cannot give expression to the opinions of, or bind, the students as a vote of theirs in mass-meeting would. The question is one of very serious import. We refer it to undergraduates and Alumni for consideration."
When the agreement was made last fall, the Yale News gave its unqualified approval to it in the following editorial of October 21: "The foot ball arrangement entered into with Harvard, printed in another column, will be greeted as a definite settlement of a matter that has given a good deal of trouble in past years. The terms of the agreement seem to be perfectly fair and it should put on a much firmer and more satisfactory basis our relations with Harvard in foot ball."
It would thus appear that the Yale News heartily approves of the agreement made four months ago; but finds fault merely with the manner in which it was made - not with the arrangement itself, as some of the New York newspapers yesterday intimated. The latter construction would of course be equivalent to an accusation of bad faith against Yale.
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