Excerpts from a Harvard Crimson editorial:

"We feel that the present football policy at Harvard is unsound, for both financial and prestige reasons...There seem to be two solutions to the present football confusion. The first is to abandon all pretexts that we are a major college football team and play purely New England schools and one or two traditional rivals. The second is to take a positive attitude toward the game which supports all other athletics at Harvard..."

"The University might as well stop trying to have football pay for everything else. It might as well look upon further football income as a pleasant surprise and decide to pay for all athletics out of the funds of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, on the grounds that physical training is as much a part of a college education as scholastic work. This will pose a difficult financial problem for the University, cutting off a large source of income without replacing it. But if Harvard wishes to continue doing literally nothing about football, it should also be honest to its undergraduates and to the public by playing average teams and charging fair ticket prices."

"We don't believe that anybody wants Harvard to go big time. Harvard doesn't need the kind of reputation that goes with beating Michigan and North Carolina--it already has an academic reputation, which is far more valuable."

"But the Alumni cannot present a case to prospective students unless the University takes certain steps. We repeat: The authors are completely opposed to athletic scholarships at Harvard. But if a man can pass the entrance examinations on his own, there are some things which the University could do without compromising admittedly sound principles.

"If we are to continue to play Ivy League football, we must broaden the personnel at [the coach's] disposal. It might be nice to upset Stanford or Army...with a team playing strictly for fun, but it is not morally justifiable to ask such a team to expose itself to a steady stream of almost inevitable injuries. Such a casualty list as this year's is a direct result of playing a schedule composed exclusively of teams which are not only deeper in talent but also deeper in numbers. One group of eleven men playing against two groups of eleven men gets tired; when it gets tired, it is very likely to get hurt.

"The current situation neither gains prestige nor pays for the athletic program. It is unfair to customers, players, and coaches.

"It need not be corrected by a revision of Harvard's schedule, if some changes are made in the attitude towards athletes here. It must not be corrected by a program of athletic scholarships--that we believe most firmly has no place at Harvard. We can play respectable football by merely loosening the stranglehold that the Administration has on any move to give athletes a given chance."

This was published on November 25, 1949.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/19...way-out-pthis/