Penn's Choice

With the addition of Pennsylvania's Francis T. Murray, the parade of "retiring" Ivy League athletic directors has grown one hundred percent. This swelling of the ranks is encouraging, for Pennsylvania has heretofore refused even to pretend a deemphasis policy. Murray's departure is good news for Harvard.

Few here realize how perilous the University's athletic position is. For many years, the University's officials have faced the alternatives of absorbing heavy deficits or buying football teams--a choice dictated first by the fact that Harvard's huge athletic plant can be maintained only if oiled by gate receipts (otherwise its cost cuts too deeply into the College's more important functions), and second, that lop-sided games all but wipe out those receipts.

Harvard chose to risk the financial lose, seeking to minimize it by such palliatives as scheduling weak, obscure opponents, and hoping for athletic plant endowment. The expedients have not been effective, for the schedule's core has necessarily remained a number of Ivy League colleges which, like Yale, talked much about deemphasis while doing the opposite, and the endowment has been meager. So long as this situation continues, Harvard's alternatives become buying teams versus dropping the sport altogether.

The results of dropping football in terms of what high-school students and their families think of Harvard might very well cripple the College's admissions program. Furthermore, the alumni reaction might be sufficient to damage the University's fund drives. Lastly, it would weaken the College's policy of providing athletic opportunities for as many different types of students as possible.

What is so heartening about Hall's and Murray's common fate, then, is that they represent a little light in a very gloomy picture. Both men were out-spoken in favor of big-time athletics, nourished by a sports-oriented admissions machine, and both scheduled a heavy press of professionalized opponents. Their departures seem to indicate a shift to Harvard's policy by Penn and Yale, and if those two can do it, presumably other Ivy League colleges can do it to.

If all this is correct, the Ivy League will probably become a mutual league at last, one where each member plays only the other members with the addition, perhaps, of a number of like colleges, all of the maintaining at least a close facsimile of Harvard's amateurism. This is what Harvard should work toward, and the firing of Murray and Hall proves that it is not impossible.