President 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 abolitioaist.
Frankly confessing his delight in the game, he solicits constructive suggestion 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.
President Hopkins merely invites serious discussion of a persistent and bother some question. There is no excuse for avoiding it. Boston Globe.
Proposals for "reforming" intercollegiate football may seem to some much like projects for perpetual motion; but the plan of such a man as President Hopkins of Dartmouth, a strong friend of athletics and sometime athletic graduate manager at Hanover, cannot but receive respectful attention. . . His suggestion that a conference of colleges and universities be called to consider football "reform," deserves to be acted on. New York Times
It is from suggestion such as it sponsored by President Hopkins of Dartmouth that great reforms grow. The Dartmouth leader's views are merely an opening wedge in ultimate correction of certain evils in intercollegiate football, not in the game itself, but in the background. "Hoppy," as all Dartmouth men know him, probably hasn't reached the solution, but he will start college presidents thinking about the general problem again and someone may hit upon a practical reform platform which is feasible. "Observer" in Boston Traveler.
President Hopkins believes in the game. The meatiest single sentence in his statement is this: "I do not want to see it exalted to its ruin by uncomprehending forces outside the college life not do I want to see it stifled to its death by exasperated forces within." He sees, what many another student of the situation perceives, that the sport has become an enormous business overshadowing almost all other forms of college activity, and that the men who make the team and great numbers of students who do not reach the varsity, live, through many months of the year by and for football and nothing else, under discipline second in efficiency only to that of war itself. How to save the sport and at the same time cut away whatever damages the students as individuals and the institutions as a whole, is the question to which President Hopkins addresses himself.
Something needs to be done. The president well says that as yet little has been proposed except either to let the game alone and take what comes, or to annihilate it. He favors neither. He wants football a game, and not an ordeal. Boston Herald.
