An expected cry of pain arose from the Ivy Circuit this week when several Ivy colleges got a curt snub from the Big Three. The athletic mouthpieces of these venerable institutions had their feelings hurt in no small way by Messrs. Conant, Griswold, and Dodds, who issued their athletic purity statement last Sunday as a Triparte Pact. The pained outcries come from two football camps.

One group feels the Big Three have implied that they are pure and the rest of the Ivy League has gone the way of Saturday's Heroes. The other clique senses no guilt; they simply would like to be on the purity bandwagon.

Leave Out the League

The Big Three presidents or their athletic minions obviously knew this hard feeling would arise. Once resolved to make such a statement, however, they had no choice but to make it together. Otherwise, they would have had to either call in all seven members of the so-called league or try to make a joint statement with certain known pristine colleges like Columbia and Dartmouth.

The former course was out because the H-Y-P boys like to avoid any possibility of falling into a formal Ivy League. These colleges, particularly Harvard and Yale, don't want to be forced into a formal round-robin circuit in which they'd have to play everyone. These two, for example, don't happen to like Penn's obvious attempts to field a Big Time team, and prefer not to play the Quakers at all. Furthermore, if all the league were included in this statement it would represent the most blatant act of athletic hypocrisy since Villanova was heaved out of the NCAA, inasmuch as several Ivy Towers do dole out athletic scholarships.

If, on the other hand, the H-Y-P officialdom had decided to let just a select few of their amateur colleagues join in the statement, there would really have been hell to pay. The Big Three has always been somewhat of a cohesive unit and can claim they are talking for themselves alone, implying nothing about anyone.

But once a few others had been tapped for this policy-stating group, the excluded members could have a right to howl that their chastity had been impugned. As it is, the ones who have protested are doing a beautiful job of self-incrimination. It takes a shady mind to find a double meaning.