Sweetening Defeat

(From The Chicago Tribune)

President Hopkins of Dartmouth thinks something ought to be done about football. He has written a letter to the president of the Dartmouth athletic council proposing to limit intercollegiate competition to sophomores and juniors. Thus Mr. Oberlander in his senior year might have coached or led the cheers instead of continuing to throw forward passes. We have never felt there was much about' football that needed reforming but if there is we don't see what improvement this new regulation would bring about. Football would continue to be of absorbing interest to undergraduates and alumni, but it would not be so well played.

President Hopkins has another proposal. He wants every college to have two teams. Dartmouth would play Cornell twice on the same afternoon, with one team at Ithaca and the other at home at Hanover. This is a reform we can understand. The idea is to make it possible for everybody to win, thus doing away with hard feeling. Two battles where only one grew before. Germans before Paris and Frenchmen before Berlin on the same day to make for international good will. Bonfires on everybody's campus and a speech by prexy in celebration of victory before the boys go singing to their beds.

Football justifies itself to undergraduates, alumni, and the public as game and spectacle. A good many college administrations distrust it and envy its hold on the students. They allow football to be played only because they discover in it moral values. Certainly not the least of these moral values is the training it gives young men in the bitterness of defeat. It tends to make them hate to lose and fear to lose, an attitude of mind that cannot be too thoroughly acquired. President Hopkins wants to sweeten defeat and thereby rob the game of its principal by-product.