What Is College For?

The American Association of University Professors in their April Bulletin accuse excessive attention to intercollegiate football as distorting values which remain with college men through life, as causing neglect of those intellectual interests which furnish "the fundamental purpose of a college education."

This is not merely teachers' talk about bad boys whose ways annoy them. The boys themselves are talking in the same tone about the same problem. When the Harvard Crimson says too much emphasis is given to college football, scoffers might retort, "There is a reason." But there was last December a meeting of college editors and Chairmen of campus organizations of Harvard, Princeton, Bowdoin, Williams, Dartmouth, and Wesleyan which pointed out the evils of the situation and made shrewd suggestions for remedial rules. When announcement was made that Yale alone took $626,194 in football receipts in the single year 1923, undergraduate criticism was quite as free as professorial comment.

Professor Phelps of Yale tells in the current Scribner's how, having made a chaffling reference to the low estate of learning in college, he was rebuked by a student who said that the earnest student is honored and respected in spite of all the current jokes. There is, in fact, something like a Nation-wide revolt among thinking students against the evils of which the professors complain. It is the graduates now who are mainly responsible for the hysteria over sports, and the evils that follow in its train. Upon the campus itself there is a decided reaction toward sanity and practical reforms. --New York World, April 27.