PRINCETON PROFESSOR FEARS EMPHASIS ON ATHLETICS INSTEAD OF SCHOLARSHIP

A remedy for the present overemphasis on intercollegiate athletics has been put forward by Professor Charles W. Kennedy, Chairman of the Princeton Board of Athletic Control.

Henry Pennypacker '88, Chairman of the Harvard Athletic Committee, in a statement to the CRIMSON last night, referred to Professor Kennedy's recently published book on "College Athletics," in which he treats the subject at length.

"Professor Kennedy" he said, "has not only offered a number of new ideas to stimulate discussion and debate among college men, but he has stated again with cogent force, the simple truths of fair play and good sportsmanship."

Pennypacker Reviews Book

In a review of the Princeton professor's "College Athletics", written for the CRIMSON Bookshelf, Mr. Pennypacker writes:

"The time has long since passed when the part played by Athletics in the life drama of the undergraduate can be ignored. Professor Kennedy discusses this tremendous interest under four heads--first, the place which sport ought to occupy in the college program; second, how it ought to be directed by the administrative officers of the university; third, how the finances of Athletics should be apportioned and administered; and fourth, where the emphasis in college sport should properly be placed."

A solution seen by Dr. Kennedy is a greater amount of circumspection on the part of university authorities in the engagement of coaches.

"The influence of the coach upon undergraduates who come under him, and whom he comes to know in many cases far better than do most teachers in their classrooms, is incalculable," Dr. Kennedy writes. "If that influence is good, making for discipline and inculcation of sportsmanship, the coach becomes in a real sense an assisting agent in the processes of the student's education. If that influence is evil, permitting false values and a repudiation of sportsmanship to govern the boy's point of view, the coach becomes a sinister, and perhaps a powerful underminer of the high purpose of the college."

Sports Judged by Benefit

Moreover, once appointed in this way, Dr. Kennedy insists, it is necessary for the proper conduct of athletics to judge the success of a coach by the extent to which he has developed a particular sport for the benefit of all men who have any aptitude or liking for that sport and not merely by his success in preparing a few men for so-called "championship" games.

Dr. Kennedy looks to university and college teachers for one remedy:

"If college teachers could once by their teaching kindle the great mass of students to the actualities of life," he says, "if they could bring to them greater sense of the privilege by which for them the struggle of life is postponed until they have had opportunity to prepare for it, the problem of undue emphasis and false values in colleges athletics would solve itself."

Faculty Supervisors Needed

Other solutions in addition to that of inspired teaching, Dr. Kennedy sees in the future. One is to have "the men who deal with the intellectual problems of the university handle also the athletic problems." In his opinion the guidance and regulation of college athletes have moved a long step forward as is evidenced by the fact that at most American colleges a member of the Faculty is responsible for the supervision of athletic affairs. But he believes that it is a duty of all university authorities and not merely those immediately concerned with athletics "to take a far more intimate, continuous and intelligent interest in the guidance and development of college athletics than has been usual in the past."

It is Professor Kennedy's opinion that "the profession of coaching must be elevated and dignified. It must be done by men of the right type, men who have adopted the profession seriously and permanently and who will lift it by their personal influence and example to the level of intelligence and idealism it is capable of maintaining. . .

"Many a coach in the past," he said, "has been tried, found wanting, and 'dropped' in deference to undergraduate and alumni demand for 'success,' who had accomplished all that could humanly be expected of him with the material at hand, but who from the beginning was all but doomed, and knew it, by the presence for three or four years at a rival institution of a few competitors of outstanding 'championship' callbre. Remembering this, one must admire the silent devotion to sport with which many a coach has labored for the development of his sport in the face of all but certain defeat, and has taken his own fall, when it came, on the ultimate ground that he 'had not produce I results,' with stoic dignity."

Considering the criticism of commercialization of college sport Dr. Kennedy points out in his book that large gate receipts in themselves do not constitute commercialization. He regards them as an evidence of the graduate's interest in and loyalty to his alma mater, and considers the funds justified if they are used by the college with scrupulous care for the development of all sports the college deems of value.

But "if money in any slightest degree enters into the aim or purpose of the sport," writes Dr. Kennedy, the process of commercialism has set in... Take away the name of the university and the loyalty of the Alumni from the most skilled football team ever developed and the flooding gate receipts will dwindle and shrink to a trickling rill."

In reviewing the book, Mr. Pennypacker says. "Older men whose hearts are young and memories keen and younger men whose blood is hot and spirits high, should read this book; but especially are its pages commended to anxious parents and college professors who are earnestly seeking to follow where the light of duty leads and who sincerely dread best interest in play and recreation smother and stifle the intellectual life.