Extreme Idealism

It is impossible to imagine three more upright and sportsmanlike men than Professor Kennedy, Mr. Bingham, and Mr. Cates, but in their positions they necessarily represent a point of view which is not that of the undergraduates, for whom athletics are really intended. If three such leaders cannot avoid directing college sport into its present impasse, if they are unable to see eye to eye--and there is no good in pretending they are--may it not be time for a complete change in the administering of our collegiate sports? And may the solution not be to turn the problem over to those most directly concerned--the students?

Yes, wash out the graduate managers and their assistants, abolish the huge office with the filing cabinets and the private contracts and the secret understandings and all the rest. Come out into the open, let in some light upon athletic dealings in our great universities. Permit youth to run its own games and sports with the decent frankness of youth. If the boy of to-day at the age of nineteen or twenty is not competent to settle his own football schedule, by what stretch of imagination is it to be presumed that he will be able, a year later, to take his part in the complex mechanism of modern business?

Those in authority will of course laugh. They will produce 67,453 reasons why it is impossible. The idea obviously is absurd. But often those of us who are older are too ready to overestimate our own capacity, assuming that years have brought us wisdom, and too ready to underestimate the capabilities of youth. There is nothing intricate about the running of college athletics. And if there is, there shouldn't be. For instance, I take exception to the belief that an undergraduate manager cannot procure tickets and hotel accommodations and arrange for the transportation of a football squad from Cambridge to New Haven, or vice versa, without the assistance of a forty-year-old man. In fact he could probably do it better if let alone. John R. Tunis in Forum.