BLOW-OFF VALVE

Thomas L. Butcher, President of the Kansas State Teachers' College,' offers an interesting if slightly illogical explanation of the present football phenomenon. Commenting on William Allen White's editorial in the Emporia Gazette denouncing the extreme popularity of the sport, President Butcher says that the game is valuable even in its modern overemphasis because it has replaced a greater evil--the practice of hazing. "Football is a blow-off valve for collegiates", says Mr. Butcher. Instead of leading the President's cow to the chapel platform the students now indulge in athletic worship, sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

This apology for hysteria would bear more reality if its first premise were true; but has hazing actually been replaced by football? At Harvard the problem of violent welcomes has been nicely solved by years of tradition; there are many colleges and universities, however, where class rushes are still as popular, where Freshman fights are as great a ceremony as ever before the regime of football. So if President Butcher considers football as the lesser of two evils he is merely adding it to the greater. His refutation of Mr. White's argument is not sound. It is possible that he has found the game a preventative for hazing in his own college and if such is the case his difficulties are removed. But in other colleges the situation remains the same. The "blow-off valve of collegiates" in many cases has been only put to greater pressure by stressing to the breaking point what might have proved a very valuable aid in letting off steam.