PORT IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

D. G. Herring, who has played on the football team at Princeton and on the rugby team at Oxford, has written for the "Princeton Alumni Weekly" the following comparison of college sport in England and America:

"University sport in England is primarily Oxford and Cambridge sport. It true that there are other universities England, but (except from the stand point of scholarship pure and simple) they count for little. 'To go up to the University' means ordinarily to become student at Oxford or Cambridge. It as been said that an understanding of English society is necessary to a comprehension of English politics. It might equally well have been said of English University sport. Both politics and 'varsity sport' are the amusements of a class which has no counterpart in this country.

Oxford and Cambridge occupy an unique position in the minds of Englishmen, a position to which no college or group of colleges can ever hope to attain in the United States. Through whatever spectacles one views English history from the thirteenth century onward, he cannot help but perceive the influence of the universities on the life of the country. I need not elaborate the point. It is sufficient to say that, like the best of everything else in English life, the universities have been saved for 'the best.'

Public Point of View Different.

"If what I have written above seems a mere digression it is because I have not yet stated the conclusion which logically follows: namely, that, since the university clientele in England is of the governing class, university sport is above and beyond popular and especially popular newspaper criticism. 'Varsity sport has its influence on the sports of the nation. But the sports of the people react scarcely at all on the universities. In this country, on the contrary, as regards football, university sport is the sport of the people. The real name of 'American' football is intercollegiate football. Last fall, according to Parke Davis, more than six million persons paid to see American college teams play football. This very fact is one of the evils complained of by many thoughtful persons. But it is a fact, and a fact unalterable, because American colleges are essentially of the people, because they are not of a class, which, however much it serves the people--and no class has ever done so much for a country as the English governing class has done for England--yet serves, and has always done so, from above.

"The rivalry of Oxford and Cambridge in sport therefore is a thing apart, a matter between themselves, something to be settled by 'young 'varsity gentlemen' without the pother and popular clamor which are the inevitable concomitants of intercollegiate contests in the United States.

Comparative Undergraduate Attitude

"Moreover, this fact necessarily makes for a different mental attitude on the part of the undergraduates. Their competition is far less strenuous. I do not mean that the play is less vigorous. But it tends to make the mere winning or losing of less relative importance. It is as though your best friend beats you in a game; you simply try to beat him the next time you play. But with us, if your greatest rival upsets your whole campaign, which has included a number of contests with other rivals in which considerable prestige is lost by defeat, the only thing left to do, according to the American mind, is to get a more efficient organization which will prevent such a catastrophe in the ture. I leave it to the reader to select his own illustration of this peculiar American tendency.

"But not only is the attitude of the American undergraduate different. It also is the loyalty of the American graduate. The Oxford or Cambridge graduate loves his university, but, unlike to graduate of Princeton or Yale, he do not love her in altogether so strenuous a fashion. He does not have to set seriously to work to convince the public that his university is serving the national more effectively than any other university. For admittedly these two do so already. He does not create graduate councils and employ publicity agents, because there is no necessity for such things. (As with the English aristocracy universities their position is established and unassesable). He does not demand championship football teams, because his university does not have to have championship teams to go on drawing the 'right sort students.'

"Therefore the graduates do not have to bring to bear on the undergraduate the constant pressure for championship teams that is one of the results of alumni loyalty in this country. And (this want especially to emphasize) if the loliaty of college students in American ceases to express itself in an intense desire to see their college athletic team win, and consequently in giving the services to organization for athletic success it may probably cease as well to find expression in the singularly generous giving to the material upbuilding of the educational plants of this country and in the constant striving for perfection of educational facilities.