YALE IS STILL AMATEUR

Much excitement has been occasioned in college ranks by the news that two Yale athletes, Platt and Scott, have been declared eligible for Varsity football, although officially put on probation last spring. Is Yale going "big time" too? In the atmosphere of professionalism, which has again this fall become more and more marked in college athletics, such events are viewed with a thoroughly jaundiced eye more often than not with justification.

The vote of the faculty to reinstate these two athletes calls attention to the Big Three eligibility rules, to the fact that by such action Yale in certain cases may gain an advantage over Harvard on the gridiron, and, more specifically, to the fact that if such a rule were in force here in Cambridge, Harvard would probably not have lost here second football captain in two years. Natural result of even a brief survey of these facts is a distinct feeling that either Yale should be made to let her athletes out of the scholastic penalty box at the same time we do, or else we should release ours when they do.

Some such arrangement would, without any question, have been most beneficial to Harvard this fall. If it were possible to arrive at such an agreement without making serious changes in the academic schedule or educational philosophy of other University, then by all means let it be done, but only under these conditions.

To criticise Yale's action as surreptitiously cheating on the eligibility agreement or to demand that Yale give up fall makeup exams is simply to overlook the facts of the case.

Makeup exams in the fall are compulsory since Yale has no regular summer school; they are taken by all men who have failed one course the spring before; they have existed, with a modification three years ago making the rules stiffer for a long time, and they are an integral part of the Yale academic schedule. This September 33 men (baside Platt and Scott) were relieved of probation, for getting honors in makeups.

The Big Three agreement does not dictate the program of finals, midyears, hour or makeup exams in each University any more than it sets the requirements for a passing grade in Freshman English. When Harvard abolished November and March probation for upperclassmen and then reduced midyear pro, it was never felt by those in Cambridge that such action was in any way the concern of Yale or Princeton.

Yale uses the system of makeups after a summer vacation in which there is no summer school as a part of her whole scholastic schedule, has long used it, and to seize upon it in the present case as a device merely for improving the football team is to be as blind to the facts as the demand that it be abolished is presumptuous. When undergraduates or alumni of Harvard are willing to consider a university as cheating on an agreement merely because it fails to reorganize its academic program so that a competitor, functioning under a different educational system entirely, may be at less a disadvantage, then truly the great god professionalism-in-athletics openly reigns supreme.