MUSCLE FOOD

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The letter in Friday's CRIMSON represents an all too common opinion hostile to football, and less explicitly to organized athletics. The hostility arises from two assumptions about the nature of organized athletics: first, that participation requires so much time as to cripple intellectual achievement, and second, that athletics are no more than displays of muscular feats without more subtle value.

These two assumptions are justified if one looks at some state universites. Football can be much overemphasized: a good athlete may need no other talent to stay in college, and the university may lavish money on him to secure the interest and donations of the alumni. With this kind of situation, Hutchins of Chicago took a drastic stop, the abolition of football, because the middle ground of deemphasis was impossible to achieve in an atmosphere tolerant to big-time sports.

But athletics can exist without crippling intellectual life, and indeed they contribute to its growth. The smaller issue is the time spent at athletics. It would be fine if one actually spent the hours and minutes saved from sports in serious reading, but there are so many way of wasting time, the chances are you will find one to occupy the time saved. The academic average of men in the big sports is not below that of the College. One man on last year's varsity crew graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and is now at Cambridge working for a degree in History. Last year's captain is one the Conant Scholarship at Hamburg, the captain before is working on geo-physics at Cambridge. During the last four from the crew have gone to Harvard Medical School. Every sport has similar men. How can one call this "hardly contributing intellectually" to the College? Evidently some scholars fell there is a great value in athletics, a value that justifies the time and effort. Another group of men in college do not have strictly scholarly interest. To argue they are deprived of intellectual food by athletics is meaningless.

The bigger, more subtle, issue is the constructive role of athletics. In college, as opposed to graduate school, it is a mistake to define too closely the nature of education, and to hold the only goal to be a high-powered intellectual excellence. . . .

A second point in the letter was the abuse of scholarships at Harvard. There will always be alumni urging men to go to their college, and lending or giving money. There is no abuse here if the spirit is right. . . . But anyone who still believes Harvard is ridden with athletic scholarships should refer himself of to Dick Clasby's article to the Saturday Evening Post. He gave up his scholarship, and incurred a debt to play football. Richard W. Darrell.