NEW REPUBLIC SUGGESTS ISSUING PIGSKIN PREFERRED ON FOOTBALL AS A BUSINESS

The following article appears in the October 28 issue of the New Republic under the title of "Pigskin Preferred." It is based on the fact that electric are lights have been placed on Soldiers Field to enable practice to be carried on after dark. In the editorial column of this paper today will be found the Crimson's solution of the present overemphasis of football.

Harvard athletic authorities have installed a dozen electric lights so that the football team may carry on practice work at any hour.... Now Harvard will have no excuse for losing because of lack of 24-hour facilities.--Daily News.

Education, as the above item (which is not of our invention) will testify, is advancing by leaps and bounds. This is one of the biggest bounds ever made. In fact, while our day remains only 24 hours long, no further bounds in this direction is possible.

This courageous innovation ought not to be surprising. For Harvard is one of the most progressive universities in the country. And not alone in athletics. In scholarship also she--"she," for like excursion boats, colleges are feminine--she has distinguished herself by recognition of the long neglected subject of business. As compared with Latin, Greek, the Renaissance and plane (not solid) ornithology, the study of business is a tender plant, and must be watered if it is not to perish in all but a few enthusiastic garrets. The President, and good fellows, and overseers and superintendents and foremen of Harvard were wise to see this obscure condition clearly, and courageous to remedy it. In action, their courage exceeded their wisdom, and they have constructed a mechanism so vast, and a financial reservoir of proportions so oceanic that the tender plant is in more danger of being drowned than not watered. However, let us not be pessimistic. Some, if not all business will sprout sturdily in spite of this golden cloud-burst, and there seems small doubt that among the lost arts revived will be those of taking down shutters, giving short change, punching time-clocks, dressing windows, reading ticker-tape and compiling sucker-lists.

Honors Go to H Man

Football, like business, is seldom pursued for its own sake. As a prominent halfback once said: "I don't run back punts for my health." It is not for amusement that the Harvard squad charges and blocks and tackles all afternoon, and it is not for sheer love of sport that they are now getting ready to grind through signal practice by artificial light. In fact, all this practicing is mighty hard work; ever so much more work than brain work. There is a malicious popular belief that football players are not naturally inclined toward brain work. This is unfair: football players have merely chosen the sterner course. Many more fail at this course than at brain-courses. Only a few men each year, out of dozens of candidates, win their letter. It is much more difficult to earn an H than an A. B. All honor, then, to those who aim at one letter rather than two. An A. B. can be obtained nowadays without burning the midnight oil. But an H requires hours and hours of midnight electricity. Never, in the history of all education, has there been so arduous a night school.

It is quite proper that football should be taken seriously. In the past it was often considered a sport, and it was played for fun in a slapdash unprofessional manner by young men who enjoyed the exercise. This race of dilettantes is now extinct, and has given place to a more conscientious generation which realizes the true function of football in any well-conducted alma mater. For alma mater flourishes by victory on the gridiron, and droops after defeat. No alma mater can withstand prolonged unsuccess at football. The reverberations of humiliation in the Stadium or the Bowl are far-reaching. Attendance in classes on Egyptology, Cryptology and the Italian drama drops off. Scholarship standards quiver and collapse. Bright young men in middle western high schools hear from afar the dismal thunder of defeat and elect to go elsewhere. Graduates and alumni (they are not identical) storm and sulk in the suburbs, write angry letters, tear up checks and send their sons to the University of Nebraska. The loss of these checks is more serious than the loss of the sons. There are always plenty of sons, but checks are ephemeral, and subject to seasonal influences. The autumn season, with its toll of games lost or won, profoundly affects the writing of checks. And checks build universities, while young men rarely inhabit them.

A graduate is one who is proud of his alma mater. An alumnus is one who is ashamed of her when she begins to lose football games. An alumnus writes more checks than a graduate, and is in every way the sterner man...

But the alumnus, for all his hard-headedness, has yet to go the whole hog. He is still dealing in half measures. The desperate resolve of the football authorities at Harvard to perfect their team by putting electric lights on the field ought to spur the alumnus to equally rigorous action. His path is clear: football must be rescued from the paralyzing limbo between amateurishness and professionalism. Much as he might sigh for the old days, it is obviously, too late to regain for the game a lost amateur standing. The present status is impossible. Onward, then to a business basis. The players must of course remain amateurs, but the game should be professionalize. This happy device would at once save honor and avoid paying salaries to the players. A stock company should obviously be floated, with the alumni subscribing for the shares. Only a few graduates would be allowed to participate, as their loyalty to the team is sometimes open to question. But since graduates are almost universally poorer men than alumni, perhaps it would not be necessary to make this humiliating discrimination against them.

The details of such a scheme we leave to men plainly more qualified than ourselves. We confess, with no little hesitation and some fear, that our own mentality is more of the graduate type than the alumnus. This means, for one thing, that we cherish the pale remains of some anxiety about educational matters in the old sense. And we should therefore like to be allowed to put in a timid plea that some of the profits of Stadium Common, or Bowl Bonds, or Pigskin Preferred, which under the reign of a competent coach would be considerable, be paid in to the University for strictly educational purposes. We do not go so far as to suggest that any professor's salary be raised, out of those profits, to a figure so near that of the football coach as to give grounds for any serious jealousy or competition. It would be safer to avoid this issue by endowing, with the Pigskin dividends, a few erudite courses in allied subjects, such as Greek games 2a, or Discus 18, or Checkers among the Early Christians, which would, by partaking at once of the nature of sport and learning, endanger neither. These courses it goes without saying, could only be given in the years following football victories. Defeat, particularly over a period of years, would diminish prod's or even wipe them out, and if the alumni stockholders in Pigskin Preferred passed a dividend or two. Discus it could no longer be thrown.

All Departments Would Contribute

Gradually the exactions of the larger Football would stimulate every science, every research department would draw a little useful contribution from every course taught in the University. Football law, football hygiene the drama of football, football ballistics football histology, the aesthetics football there is no area of haunch knowledge in which the football could not make at least a first down.

But let every bit of research every signing of contract with coaches every advanced secret practice, every current of the Pigskin melon, be performed is electric light. Too much daylight not good for the game for business football.

An A. B. can be obtained nowadays without burning the midnight oil. But an H requires hours and hours of midnight electricity....

No alma mater can withstand prolonged unsuccess at football....

Bright young men in middle western high schools hear from afar the dismal thunder of defeat and elect to go elsewhere....

A graduate is one who is proud of his alma mater. An alumnus is one who is ashamed of her when she begins to lose football games....

It is obviously too late to regain for the game a lost amateur standing. The present status is impossible. Onward, then, to a business basis....

We should like to be allowed to put in a timid plea that some of the profits of Stadium Common, or Bowl Bonds, or Pigskin Preferred, which under the reign of a competent coach would be considerable, be paid in to the University for strictly educational purposes....

It would be safer to avoid this issue by endowing, with the Pigskin dividends, a few erudite courses in allied subjects, such as Greek games 22, or Discus 13, or Checkers among the Early Christians....

Football law, football hygiene, the drama of football, football ballistics, football histology, the aesthetics of football--there is no area of human knowledge in which the football could not make at least a first down....

Too much daylight isn't good for the game--or business--of football.