Dialogue at Brown

Just for the heck of it, tall, tense, Brown University English Instructor Wade C. Thompson, 35, placed an ad in the Brown Daily Herald:

Will all students of Brown and Pembroke (undergraduate or graduate), all faculty members, library or administrative officials, who wish to sign a petition calling for the abolition of intercollegiate football at Brown, please contact Wade Thompson, Pl 1-6767.

Thompson had assumed that football was a subject fit for kidding at Brown, which was an eager signer of the Ivy League de-emphasis pact of 1954, has since played the game so honorably that its teams have won 24 games, lost 20. But to his astonishment, Thompson soon learned that football is no laughing matter--even at Brown. His phone rang night and day with anonymous threatening calls from sullen students. Curious to see how Brown would react to more balloon pricking, Thompson stuck tongue farther in cheek, called for the abolition of the Navy and the FBI. His phone jangled louder than ever.

By last week, what had started as an idle lark had become a serious affair for both Thompson and Brown. Not only was the flare-up drawing headlines in Providence papers, but newspapers across the nation were carrying deadpan accounts that bore no hint of its whimsical beginnings. Wincing at the story's effect on alumni fund drives and student recruitment programs, Brown officials, with hopes of clearing the air, approved a debate between Thompson and Athletic Director Paul F. Mackesey.

At last week's debate Mackesey said all the right things: that the whole affair had mushroomed out of proportion, that the school's football players get better grades as a whole than the student body at large, that athletics is only a means to an end at Brown.

But Thompson cut to the heart of the matter when he noted that the very suggestion of an alien idea had been enough to terrify far too many Brown students. "Football," said Critic Thompson, "has been removed from sane, sensible dialogue. It has been checkered with cliches, mired in sentimental mush, drowned in tears and flapdoodle ... If my remarks have hurt Brown, that can only prove that football is more sanctified than any of us has estimated. The only way to really help is to bring football back into the dialogue, to subject it to all the resources of the dialogue, including wit, humor, paradox."

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