Under the title of "A Harvard View of a Yale Athletic Problem," Dean Briggs contributes to the current number of the Alumni Bulletin the following article on the recent disqualification of five Yale men from intercollegiate athletics:

A few facts about the Yale athletes who have found themselves disqualified under the Yale eligibility rules should be generally known:

"(1) There in eligibility was reported by Yale in Princeton and Harvard before any public announcement.

"(2) Neither Princeton nor Harvard would have protested these players; and, so far as Princeton and Harvard were concerned. Yale was free to use her own judgment.

"(3) Though the rules of Yale, Princeton and Harvard are fundamentally alike their likeness is based on a mutual understanding and on no intercollegiate agreement now in force. Examination reveals in the three sets of rules considerable differences.

"(4) The five players themselves withdrew before definite action by the Yale Athletic Association.

"(5) The Yale Athletic Association in the persons of its Chairman and Treasurer generously took on itself the blame for the unfortunate position of the five players.

"It is difficult to see how any college could have acted more honorably than Yale and impossible to find two men more sensitively and generously right minded than the Chairman and the Treasure of the Yale Athletic Association.

"To cynical or sceptical persons it may seem incredible that the five athletes, who must have heard endless talk about the professionalism of summer ball, were substantially innocent; it is at least equally incredible that a group of the best Yale athletes should wittingly jeopardize their amateur status by openly doing what invited investigation and would not bear it. The endless talk they have heard may itself be one cause of their ignorance. Nothing is more be wildering nothing is viewed in more varied and contradictory ways, than the ethics and the academic result, of summer ball-playing. There is the institution which believer that a man may work his way through college by pitching in summer leagues and remain in the college nine; there is the institution which disqualifies a man who plays in a fame in which a professional takes part on either side; and there are all manner of intermediate institutions. Every amateur team takes expenses out of the gate receipts, if those receipts are sufficient; and few men young or old, whose expenses are paid lead ascetic lives. The Yale players had their expenses paid. We have no evidence that they received more and we have their own testimony that they did not.

"This testimony and their allegation of ignorance every fair-minded man must accept; first, because, on general principles, they should have the benefit of the doubt; next, because they are men whose word amount those who know them is taken without question. Nor should their ignorance surprise anybody who has closely observed youth. A printed rule forbade their receiving board; probably not one of them had ever read the book of rules. If students read--and remembered--all the printed matter made accessible to them by the college office, there would be an immediate cut in the price of college administration. Year in and year out with consequences varying from embarrassment to dismissal, students get their information on vital questions, not at headquarters, but in clubrooms or in the street; not from those officers who alone speak with authority, but from fellow-students who got it from others. Yale had apparently permitted some university players to play among professionals or semi-professionals, and to play summer ball at Quogue. Of course she would have disqualified any player known to receive pay above his expenses--that is a different matter. Of the five men some had played at Quogue before; all get their information from Yale men who had played at Quogue or been concerned with the Quogue team. Culpably careless they may have been. I see no reason for charging them with anything worse. When the new committee, not grasping the situation till the damage was done, expounded the rule to them, they paid for their board, but too late.

"When their disqualification was made public, the attitude of Harvard students was refreshing. I have yet to hear a word of satisfaction either in the punishment of Yale teams. One and all the students have expressed their sympathy with their fellow-students of a rival college and their regret that such a player as LeGore, admired for his skill and respected for his personal qualities, should no longer match himself against Harvard men. With warm admiration for the Yale authorities in athletics, some of us yet believe that the reform of an evil, provided the evil is not a crime, begins best after clear warning, and that the penalty is wisely applied first to those whose transgression is as conscious as it is unmistakable. Yale has shown that she will risk severity toward herself rather than unfairness toward a rival. We wish her to believe that her rival is not only a rival but a partner; that she is as free to use her students according to their deserts as if no intercollegiate games were involved; and that in abolishing summer ball for the future and ignoring it in the dimly lighted past she would now not merely restore some of her best athletes to their own, but would help Harvard to a larger and truer view of intercollegiate athletic friendship."