OUR ATHLETIC POLICY

President Lowell's statement of Harvard's athletic policy epitomizes the case against intercollegiate sports, and particularly football, as they are now organized and clearly explains for the first time how the administration proposes to meet the situation.

As he says, "At present the intercollegiate sports resembles less those of 50 years ago than they do the world series of the professional baseball leagues, the games in the coliseum at Rome or the races in Constantinople which brought Justinian into conflict with the populace", but "the true end lies in promoting physical development and well being throughout the student body." This is an enlightened and straightforward recognition of the distorted values which have been placed on collegiate athletics. It gives assurance of corrective measures at Harvard and hope that they will be applied generally in the colleges and universities of the United States as the movement spreads.

The President notes two measures, one positive and one negative, which have been taken by the administration. At the very center quite rightly is the athletics for all policy which has been successfully put into operation by Mr. Bingham and may be expected to grow rapidly in strength. The CRIMSON has supported and will continue to support to the utmost this policy.

Necessarily correlative, however, with the building up of general participation in sport must be the destruction of that superstructure of stadia, highly paid coaches, mythical intersectional championships, tremendous box office receipts and so on, which have made intercollegiate sport into spectacle, have caused it to be conducted, as Mr. Lowell points out, not for the benefit of the students, but to furnish entertainment to the alumni and the public. Here Mr. Lowell has not carried out his ideas to their logical conclusion. He makes no mention, for instance, of an athletic endowment which would eliminate the pressing need for the football spectacle to pay for the general physical development of the undergraduate body. His one point, that in order to reduce the excessive prominence of games preceding the annual Yale encounter, Harvard has made it a rule not to play continually year after year with any other college, seems doubtful from several points of view. In practice Harvard does play, or has until the recent Princeton break, four other rivals which are rapidly becoming traditional, Brown, Dartmouth, Holy Cross, and Princeton. Furthermore in traditional rivalries, the game itself is less rather than more emphasized because of the large social element. Certainly the football game and the crew race with Yale are social events in which the athletic contests themselves are almost minor. It might be pointed out that the schedule next year contains two intersectional games which will hardly decrease the excessive prominence of the games preceding Yale.

Nevertheless, although on this angle the policy of the administration leaves much to be desired, the courageous recognition of the situation, and the application of the far-sighted athletics for all policy as a corrective are forward steps of vital significance. The fundamental correlative measures must sooner or later follow as their logical necessity becomes more apparent.