TWELFTH SPY

Harvard's Student Council has seen that it is good, this land of milk and honey which lies across the Jordan. The Councilors have looked beyond an ocean in the search for a more ideal athletic establishment, and their eyes have at long last lingered on the historic precincts of Oxford and Cambridge. The revolutionary plan which they consequently sketched and which appears in the current athletic report is nothing more nor less than an approximation to the system of athletic relationships which exist in the twin sultans of English learning.

In much-distilled terms, the fond picture projected by the report is of a vastly more vigorous intra-mural sports program. Its scope is grander, the facilities are more equal to the demands, the coaching is better, the spirit of competition is keener, the participation is larger. The elusive fire-fly of "athletics for all" will for once be captured. There will be a decisive de-emphasis of sports if by emphasis is meant playing to win--for the old grads and the Sunday columnists. There will be new emphasis in the sense of athletics for sport and for physical gain.

This is all very similar to the English system, where intra-mural athletics exist to the exclusion of everything but the final game with the rival blue. And even this is incorporated into Harvard's brawny heaven. For the season's culmination is to be a meeting with the champion gentlemen from New Haven. There is to be a little Yale-Harvard axis around which the minor sports world revolves, with all other colleges somewhere off in another universe.

But not everyone is an Anglophile. Which is to say that there will be reverberations of protest against this report from a large body of graduates and undergraduates. Like a measure to lower tariffs, it strikes at the roots of vested interests. Particularly disgruntled will be the minor sports athlete who will not easily give up his "H" for a House letter tossed in his direction as a sop. If he is a wrestler or soccer man, he might in the future to be more than propitiated by the elevation of his sport to a major status, provided this action was justified by popularity. Also forced to sacrifice will be the administration, for the abolition of intercollegiate competition in minor sports means the abolition of a corresponding amount of publicity--publicity which Harvard must greedily seek no matter how proud she is. It means in addition the abolition of a certain amount of contact with the rest of the collegiate world, and a shrinking back into a cramped Cambridge-New Haven shell. Fortunately these effects are quantitatively unimportant. And opposite them can be entered the more-than-compensating gains to the student body as a whole.

Granted the ends, the mechanical difficulties must not be snubbed, and it is possible that the Council report has erred in this direction. More likely than not, there will be coaching difficulties, for coaches must live by their intercollegiate reputations, and perhaps only a few will be willing to inter themselves at Harvard. Moreover, the system depends to a considerable extent upon a Yale that is agreeable to cooperation and ready to complement it with a similar set-up. Yet such objections do not invalidate the idea; and if this is accepted in its essence it can develop only with time. Provided the journey is made relentlessly but gradually and cautiously, the difficulties will resolve themselves with the benefit of this time.