Credit for the most damaging advance yet made against big-business football in the colleges must go to Yale University, which, in a report of a special committee appointed by President Angell, has announced a radical change in its athletic system. For two decades there has been a movement in many institutions toward the democratization of sport, with greater emphasis on intramural competition. Sporadic efforts have been made to encourage, by one device or another, spontaneous play on the part of the entire student body. But Yale's new plan for the future will, if carried through as projected by the committee, bring about a veritable transformation.

Urging that sports budgets be drastically pruned, the committee which drew up the new program took vigorous exception to recent policy, declaring that "the tremendous cost of athletics at Yale, as well as at all other universities, is the outgrowth of the nation-wide wave of post-war extravagance." . . . Expenditures have been boosted so high that the committee has been forced to figure out ways in which the Athletic Association's debt can be liquidated by 1935. The retrenchment, however, is not merely financial. The committee desires also to defiate the present football ballyhoo. . . This is no mere taking away of privileges; rather, Yale wisely is planning to tie the new system in with its scheme for ten residential colleges, developing group rivalry, stimulating student initiative, providing more time free from class work in the afternoons, emphasizing recreation for the many, and doubling the use of available equipment.

Alumni opinion is of course divided, but the defense of the good old days appears less robust than might have been expected. There is a strong current of student protest. Three members of this year's varsity, headed by the renowned "Albie" Booth, have joined with Coach Stevens in deploring the exposure of first-team men to the grave risk of lost games. They assert that Yale teams "have been winning teams for sixty years," and they bespeak tender solicitude for a "splendid record" and a "noble heritage." The Yale Daily News fears "the complete obliteration of Yale's athletic traditions." The Harvard CRIMSON and the Daily Dartmouth, on the other hand, support the Yale committee's proposals, an approval which, we fear, may not be construed by all Yale fans as entirely disinterested. The entire faculty world of America will be heartily grateful if this Yale proposal is adopted by the university authorities and proves the practicability of reducing athletics to their proper position in academic life. --The Nation.