DEAD BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

This morning's announcement by the Ivy A.A. directors demonstrates how vitally necessary is some solution to the problem which the new-defunct League sought to solve. The very excuses which destroyed the naively amateurish hopes of the undergraduates who proposed the League prove that some such plan must be developed if Harvard is to continue to play football on its present basis.

The League was suggested by undergraduates in seven colleges, hopeful that some common ground, no matter how slight, could be found for "the salvation of athletic idealism from the serious threats that menace it today". Seven representatives of the most renowned educational institutions in the East should have been able to reach a basis for mutual agreement on this subject. But they merely returned with more of the same hypocritical assertions of "belief" that have served to veil but not conceal the real issue in the last three years.

They couldn't agree because they didn't trust each other. In baseball, basketball, and track it has been possible to cooperate. But when they talk of football, when the cold cash of gate receipts is threatened by mutual concessions--then "Some doubt was expressed that the establishment of a formal league would attain all the desired ends".

What are the desired ends which could not be harmonized with the noble desire "to play this game with the highest type of sportsmanship" -- simply to have winning teams, to compete at all costs, to fill the stadia.

The abysmal failure of seven Ivy college representatives to make any move to ward off the tidal wave of professionalism should prove that professionalism, like war, is not to be eradicated with mere diplomatic palaver by men whose hands are tied. University presidents must give up hiding their heads in the sand and assume the responsibility which they have unfairly foisted upon athletic directors and coaches--unless, of course, they are willing to admit that football can not be amateur henceforth. If athletics are part of college life, and if gate receipts make up an important share of the university's budget, then the presidents and governing boards must assume the duties for which they were chosen.