Football Challenged

(From The Boston Globe)

The itch to reform football recurs periodically. A few weeks ago the rules committee decreed changes of so drastic a nature that nobody can foretell whether the game will be the same another fall or something entirely different. Two decades ago, when brutality was the major issue, the reform movement could be stopped by simply changing the rules. Not so today. The bill of complaint lies beyond the control of those who frame the playing rules. The whole influence of intercollegiate football is under fire.

The courage of Pres. Hopkins of Dartmouth in bringing the dispute out into the open is a splendid contrast to the pussyfooting tactics employed generally by faculty critics. It is one thing to adopt a supercilious attitude toward the problem, and never to come to grips with it. It is quite another thing to risk incurring the disfavor of the powerful graduate cliques to whom the hectic struggle for intercollegiate supremacy on the gridiron appeals as strongly as games of chivalry appealed to the nobility of the Middle Ages.

Pres. Hopkins reveals in his letter to the Dartmouth Athletic Council two qualities which make his challenge a formidable one. He is not dogmatic. He is not an abolitionist.

Frankly confessing his delight in the game, he solicits constructive suggestions in order that football may be saved from its overzealous friends. Such proposals as he himself offers may or may not be practical. He does not pretend to have discovered a panacea.

Highly organized graduate control, proselyting, the interest in college football taken by professional gamblers—these are symptoms of an alleged disease called overemphasis which is said to be agitating our institutions of higher learning, possibly to the detriment of their primary purpose.

Pres. Hopkins merely invites serious discussion of a persistent and bothersome question. There is no excuse for avoiding it.