College Horses

During the boom times, Butler University (enrollment: 1,414) at Indianapolis, Ind. did its athletes proud. It built a big stadium and an elaborate Butler Field House. Ruefully last week Butler's President Walter Scott Athearn took stock. University assets are some $6,000,000. Last year's deficit came to $7,000. Describing the athletic outlay as ''millstones about the neck of the school which bid fair to bankrupt and close [it] within five years." President Athearn declared that the day of intercollegiate athletic spectacles is gone, never to return. "Gate receipts,'' mourned he, "will not pay the $1,000,000 indebtedness on our athletic plant. Neither will friends of the university pay for a 'dead horse.'

In the October Atlantic Monthly is a suggestion on the football finance problem by President Henry Smith Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching. The problem, says he, is "to substitute some other sport for football that will bring just as much revenue into the college chest while not exacting the toll in young lives and lowered college ideals. . . . The substitute must provide at least three things: it must be a great spectacle which will attract crowds of paying sightseers, it must invoke at least the semblance of college rivalry, and it must be so ordered that graduates and undergraduates can easily bet their money on the result. . . .

"There is one sport that fulfills all these conditions, an ancient sport beloved of men from time immemorial--horse racing. ... In all sacred and profane literature the horse has been the intimate friend of man, and it has been his mission to take upon his broad shoulders the load that had become too heavy for his master. ... In the first place, it is a better money-maker than a football show. Secondly, it is the sort of event on which the old grads and the undergrads can bet in more ways than they can even in football. In the third place, it has the great advantage that the whole audience, including the feminine part, can understand it. ... It has a universal human appeal. It is more conservative to tie up to horse racing as a steady income than to football, which has indeed proved a paying investment in recent years, but which may go bad in the market at any moment. . . . Think what a pot of money a Harvard-Yale horse race would take in!"

College presidents who take Dr. Pritchett's suggestion seriously will face immediate difficulties. Horse race tracks are a mile or more around while the biggest stadiums have running tracks of scarcely a half-mile, suitable only for trotting races with colts or fillies.

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