POUR LE SPORT

Yammering among educational, athletic and apostolic authorities as to whether the football player shall be allowed to play football, a question that enjoys a peculiar frightfulness just after the season, has just had a particularly obnoxious renascence. With the open season a month over, the familiar problem has pushed up the cover of the ashcan, straightened its necktie, shined its shoes on its trouser legs, and strode boldly into the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Carnegie Foundation has, by means of intelligence tests (and what a world of blasted hopes and teary smiles is in those two words!) discovered that college athletes rate thus according to intelligence: Tennis players, 87 percent; fencers, 81 percent; wrestlers, oarsmen and water polo players, 80 percent; non-athletes and golfers, 79 percent, athletes (average), 78 percent; football, 73 percent; and track, 70 percent.

If there are any conclusions to be drawn from these figures, other than ethical ones on the use of Scotch endowments, the duty of the tennis athlete is the clearest of these. Football toil has watered his courts, whitened his base lines and paid for his southern trip; courtesy, as one athlete to another, demands that he fatten the scholastic average of football by his presence on the squad. Double endeavor would perhaps create havoc among the statisticians; but that is a phenomenon, like the changing intelligence of a three letter man, which is overlooked in the Foundation's computations.

It would be difficult to imagine a relationship less susceptible of statistical treatment than that of scholarship and athletics. An ill educational dictum it it, however, that does not blow some sporting columnist ten inches of copy: The truly unfortunate part of the attack is not that it discovers in track a sport that has pushed football out of the cellar position in the academic pennant race, even though such discovery may prove a hardship to many article writers. Grave astonishment is the natural reaction to the unsportsmanlike conduct of the Carnegie Institute. The athlete, helpless under what has been called "the dumbing influence of athletics", is struck down with an adding machine and his body run over by the juggernaut of the intelligence quotient. He cannot answer his assailants: they themselves have said that his weapons are duller than standard fighting gear. One learns to accept all things in time; it remains painful, however, to picture the Carnegie Foundation clipping from behind.