"World" Proposal 50 Years Ago Contains Cure for Athletic Overemphasis--Suggests Harvard-Yale Race to North Pole

Fifty years ago, at a time when intercollegiate athletics needed stimulating far more than curbing, the New York World came out with a suggestion which if put into effect, might have altered the whole future development of Harvard athletics. At that time Congress was considering several projects for reaching the North Pole, and it is with this object in view that the World says:

"We propose that Harvard and Yale Colleges lay aside all their ordinary forms of emulation at baseball, football, athletic games; and boating, and concentrate all their rivalry on a desperate race to the North Pole."

The Wolrd then goes on to say that the sums of money spent on athletic contests and their incident banquets are so large that the scheme ought to present no financial difficulties. A Harvard undergraduate writer of the time asks why the project might not be carried out, and baseball and boating still continue as before.

"Experience has taught us," he says, "that we have always room for one more interest to support, be it Rifle Club or Athletic Association. If a shingle be prepared, with a seal bearing the device of a Crimson Flag floating from the North Pole, we have no fears that members more than enough would hasten to join the H. N. P. D. A., Harvard North Pole Discovery Association. The doubt might be raised, to be sure, whether the ardor of the sledgers would not cool by the time they reached the region of the tenth parallel, but in that case we should still have the shingles."

This parallel would no longer be posiible. Byrd and Amundsen have taken the last chance for glory from Harvard-Yale athletics by charting the road to the Pole. Had the original proposal been carried out, the evils of intercollegiate athletics might never have survived until today. Instead of preparations for the annual football contest, the fall might find the hardy occupants of the Crimson and Blue sledges girding their loins for a final dash across the perilous ice fields of the Arctic to the Pole.