Yale Deflates

Publicized into overemphasis, U. S. college football has long been a subject of concern to wise-headed educators. Last year Columbia's President Nicholas ("Miraculous") Murray Butler urged that rich alumni endow football so that football could forget gate-receipts. Said he: "Perhaps what is needed is an academic League of Nations. . . . Until something of this sort is done Columbia must remain one of those colleges which pays the penalty." (TIME, Jan. 5, 1931). Few other university officials agreed with President Butler, but at the University of Pennsylvania President Thomas Sovereign Gates last autumn inaugurated a system of de-emphasis. Under the Gates Plan, all athletics are in a department of physical education headed by a dean. Coaches rank as faculty members, will eventually be paid as little. Intramural sports are stressed. Only seven varsity football games were scheduled for 1932. Educators expected other universities to try other de-emphasizing plans, but few anticipated that a leader would be found in the college with one of the greatest athletic machines in the U. S.--Yale.

But it was Yale which announced last week a radically new athletic policy. Though de-emphasis of athletics will be the result, it was not the sole cause of Yale's step. It was necessitated by Philanthropist Edward Stephen Harkness' $12,000,000 "house plan" under which Yale's undergraduates are to live in ten communities, each with its own club-rooms, dining-hall, instead of in dormitories. The athletic policy, to begin in September 1933, was outlined by President James Rowland Angell:

1) All Yale varsity squads, including football, will be much smaller, do less, cost less, omit pre-season practice, scouting, intersectional games, special training tables. The football team will play five games instead of seven. Like a leaking dirigible, Yale's great athletic plant will gradually deflate, will be cut up, blown up, to become

2) Ten little balloons: each of the ten '"houses" will have amateur-coached, University-equipped teams, practicing on University fields, playing games among themselves.

3) By 1935 Yale hopes to admit undergraduates free to all varsity contests. Classes will be rearranged to allow more time for intramural sport, so that the athletic opportunities of the average middleweight undergraduate will be greatly increased.

Framers of the plan were three famed Yale athletes: Professor Robert Selden Rose, star pitcher (1908) and now chairman of the Board of Control of Yale's Athletic Association; George Townsend Adee, quarterback (1893-94) and onetime (1916-20) president of the National Tennis Association; Malcolm Pratt Aldrich (1922), football and baseball captain.

Hailed as an economy, the new Yale policy is an enormous luxury. Yale box-office power will not entirely vanish, but fewer games, probably less effective teams will decrease the gate receipts. Endowments will have to be found to support athletics. Thus Yale indirectly will follow Columbia's Butler's advice.

Other universities, the Press and Yale undergraduates were respectively astonished, interested, aghast. The undergraduate Yale Daily News printed a statement from undergraduates Albert ("Albie") Booth, Edward Rotan and John S. Wilbur:

"Yale football teams have been winning teams for 60 years; the players who have gone before have built up a splendid record and a noble heritage for the players who are to come. Is this record to be discounted, to be disregarded?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.