Saturday's Child

Even people convinced of the righteousness of the amateur cause have found it difficult to absorb Harvard's last three football defeats without a slight touch of indigestion. There is something intrinsically unpleasant about being slaughtered, and when outsiders are making a great deal of fuss over the losses, things are that much worse.

Today the football team faces another tough opponent which gives critics of Harvard football a good excuse for criticizing. One such critic, pounding out his newspaper column this week, said:

"They do not think, over there at Harvard, that a boy who helps draw a quarter of a million dollars on a Saturday afternoon at a great personal sacrifice in time and effort and teeth is entitled to room, board, and tuition... It is all right for the old men to expect and demand something for nothing, as Harvard has done since Bingham appeared on the scene, but it is terribly wrong for young men to do the same thing, though the young men ask only the few pence that will give them a college education and the old men operate a billion-dollar racket."

This quotation represents what is wrong with Harvard football, but not quite in the way in which the writer intended. Football policy cannot be determined by considerations of profit and loss. To be sure, football does help to pay for Harvard's "athletics for all" program, which is one of the best in the country. But that program justifies itself, and must justify the great sums of money spent on it whether that money comes from football ticket sales or students' tuition charges.

Of course, it is still wrong to send a team of completely amateur students against one that aspires to more professional standards, simply because such games will draw more fans and hence more money. That is why Harvard's schedule next year will include teams whose athletic policies more closely resemble our own. This move will solve one aspect of the problem--the consistently lop-sided scores--but it will not satisfy the people who want to see Harvard restored to its football eminence of several decades ago.

A revised admissions policy has been put forward as the cure for this part of the dilemma. If alumni really scoured the country for "scholar-athletes," it is argued, Harvard could field a respectable football team each year without resorting to paying players or lowering its academic standards. But this sort of program must be carefully watched. Attempts to get more good all-round students to apply to Harvard and thus broaden the base from which the admissions committee can choose are ipso facto desirable. But misdirected efforts which unbalanced this broad base in favor of football players or any other group with specific technical skills would just as surely be undesirable.

If a university's primary aim is to make money on football, then it should invest some of its capital in a professional team such as the Chicago Bears. Harvard is an educational institution; its reputation is built on its education, and only fluctuations in the standard of education will effect that reputation in the long run. If football can be a part of education without creating an elite group in the student body or damaging students' academic careers, so much the better. It will matter little what teams we play in addition to our traditional rivals or what our record is in any particular year, as long as the weekend weather is fair and the slaughter--on either side--is not too terrible.