To the Editor of the CRIMSON:
Though the enclosed clipping is some months old, it presents a view which I believe cannot be put before the undergraduates of the College too forcibly or too often.
What Lawrence Perry reports as the attitude west of the Alleghenies is likewise the attitude of practically every Harvard man with whom I came in contact in New York. Here, perhaps more than in Boston, we meet graduates of other colleges, and find our friends from Princeton particularly congenial to our tastes and views.
I deeply regret the breach in athletic relations and the loss of the thrill that came with every contest against Princeton, but even more keenly do I regret that the fault in the matter appears to have been chiefly Harvard's.
Only the undergraduates and the college officers in charge can correct the situation. The great body of Harvard graduates throughout the country is waiting for them to take the first step that will reestablish Harvard in the public esteem to which she is so well entitled, but which no college can afford to neglect. Yours very truly, Theodore S. Kenyon, A.B. 1911.
(Ed. Note--The following clipping from the New York Evening Sun for September 28, 1927, was enclosed by Mr. Kenyon:)
Denever, Col., September 28--One of the interesting discoveries in the course of the writer's Western migration is that out in this friendly region even Harvard and Princeton men do not hate one another.
Beyond the Alleghenies and westward to the Pacific Ocean the tendency of Yale, Harvard and Princeton men is to amalgamate. In more than one city they are members of a joint organization, holding dinners and field days together and in general working in the interest of the traditional national prestige of the late lamented Big Three.
The militant organizations of State university alumni in the various important cities of the West appear to be one of the chief causes of the drawing together of the far-flung grads of the institutions at Cambridge, New Haven and Princeton, but other causes are a common interest in the athletic fortunes of the three time-honored Eastern universities, and a tendency to think alike not only on athletic subjects but on educational ideals and standards as they are promulgated at these seats of learning, and there is a social element only at Chicago where, by the way, there is a large and flourishing Yale-Harvard-Princeton club, may Harvard men be found who think that perhaps Princeton was too brush in her football tactics. This attitude appears to have been the result of some evangel of hate who came to Chicago from the East when Harvard and Princeton finally broke relations, but, even so, there is the feeling among Chicago Harvard men that athletic relations should be resumed. Elsewhere throughout the West Harvard graduates whom the writer has met deprecate the break without question, and invariably the first question they put to the writer involves the prospects of a restoration of football and other competitive games between the two. If in the East the two bodies of alumni regretted the Harvard-Princeton status as deeply as they do in the middle West and Rocky Mountains not a great deal of time would elapse before the Crimson and the Orange and Black would be mingled in friendly rivalry. One can by no possibility have any idea how influential the Big Three has been throughout the country until he travels widely. By all college men of whatever affiliation there is a respect for the Harvard-Princeton tradition that is wholly genuine and unreserved. And the ethical standards which the Big Three devised years ago to the end that emphasis on intercollegiate sport be kept within bounds are the standards very largely that have been adopted throughout the country by the various collegiate athletic organizations.
The disintegration of a trio so intrenched in tradition and so powerful because of the caliber of their graduates in all sections of the country is deprecated not only by alumni of these institutions but by college men generally, the feeling being that when a rupture such as this occurs in quarters so high the whole cause of intercollegiate sport is injured. Certainly the present Harvard-Princeton situation casts rather a sardonic light upon the claims that sport breeds many virtues and sturdy normal qualities that are valuable when the athletes go out into the world.
