All the serious evils of college athletics centre about the gate-receipts, the grandstand, and the paid coach. Yet the aim of nearly every college appears to be to fasten these evils upon the institution by means of a costly concrete stadium or bowl, and by means of more and more money for coaches. When the alumni come forward to 'support their team,' they usually make matters worse. Typical of their attitude is a letter signed in Philadelphia last fall by some thirty graduates of a small college:--
'The team has just closed the most disastrous season in its history.... The alumni will coöperate cheerfully with the undergraduates in increasing the football levy. It only remains, then, to initiate a campaign for procuring the money.... We must depart from our time-worn precedents and give _more money for the coaches_! Alumni are tired of reading the accounts of useless defeats!'
The extent to which interest in athletics is deadened by paid coaches was shown last spring, when a track team from one university, after traveling over two hundred and fifty miles--at the expense of the student body--to compete with the team of another institution, took off their running shoes and went home because the _coaches_ could not agree on the number of men who should participate in the games. Could there be a more abject sacrifice of the educational purposes of athletics? Consider the spectacle. A glorious afternoon in spring, a perfect playground, complete equipment in readiness, two score of eager youth in need of the health and recreation that come from sport pursued in the fine spirit of sport. Could anything keep them from playing? Nothing but the spirit of modern American intercollegiate athletics and the embodiment of that spirit, the paid coach, who knows that there is but one crime that he can commit--that of losing a contest.
The athletic policy of many an institution is determined by a commercial aim, the supposed needs of advertising, much as the utterances of many a newspaper are dictated by the business manager. But does the advertising gained through intercollegiate athletics injure or aid a college? At one railroad station I was greeted by a real-estate agent who offered to sell me 'on easy terms a lot in the most beautiful and rapidly growing city in America.' (Thus do I safely cover its identity.) Among the attractions, he mentioned the local college. He was proud of it; he said it had the best baseball team in the state. Apart from that he had not an intelligent idea about the institution, or any desire for ideas. The only building he had visited was the grandstand. He could not name a member of the faculty or a course of instruction. College advertising which gets no further than this is paid for at exorbitant rates.