Hutchins Opposes Early September Gridiron Workout

President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, writing in today's issue of the Saturday Evening Post, claims that Harvard is giving a "bad example" to the country by holding pre-season football practice. He states that this evil is the result of having hard games at the beginning of the season, and that in turn these early games are inspired by a desire to secure larger attendance.

Complaining that "in many American colleges it is possible for a boy to win-twelve letters without learning to write one," President Hutchins suggests that the best way to rid college football of overemphasis is to have a ten cent gate. He would also give athletic directors some kind of academic position "so that their jobs depend on their ability as instructors and their character as men, and not on the gates they draw."

Denies Football Makes Money

He denies that college football is a moneymaker and cites, as example, an institution "that was the country's most sensational football college." Last year, he says, when it was sold at auction and bought by bondholders, it was discovered that it was running $72,000 a year behind its budget.

Hutchins commends a plan of former President Lowell to allow each sport only one game a season, and that one to be with the college's natural rival, as can be seen in England in the cases of Oxford and Cambridge. He declared: "Mr. Lowell's scheme might have the merit of enabling students and the public to work off their seasonal frenzy in one big saturnalia."