548 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



DOMESTIC AND INTEKCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS.* 



By Professor CALVIN M. WOODWARD, 



WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY. 



I NEED no statistics to prove that engineering schools and engi- 

 neering departments as a rule take no active part in intercollegi- 

 ate athletics. There may be exceptions, but we never hear of the 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Troy, or Worcester, or 

 Stevens, on the gridiron or on the diamond or in regattas. How the 

 teams are made up at Harvard and Yale, Cornell, Wisconsin, Michigan 

 and Pennsylvania, I do not know, but I suspect that student engineers 

 are generally 'too busy' to find time, and too interested in their work 

 to feel an overmastering craving for athletics, so the athletic spirit 

 which occasionally bursts into flame is gradually quenched by the 

 steady stream of 'lectures' and 'laboratory calls.' 



Doubtless we have all been somewhat to blame in this matter. We 

 have seen so much that the student engineer ought to get and to do, 

 and so much that the future engineer ought to know and to be, that 

 we have pre-empted the students' hours of play and recreation as well 

 as their hours of study, and have overlooked the plain duty of attend- 

 ing to the physical natures and appetites of the young men in our 

 charge. 



It is my conviction that we have made a serious mistake. To a 

 certain degree we have defeated ourselves. Faculties and boards of 

 control have great responsibilities in the direction of athletics, which 

 responsibilities in a vast majority of cases they fail to meet properly. 

 Sometimes they grossly mismanage matters, but more often they neg- 

 lect them and try to ignore them. They let things drift. They admit 

 in a half-hearted way that physical culture is a good thing, but they 

 discourage every development of athletics under student management, 

 while they inaugurate no adequate management of their own. In 

 many cases athletic managers, supported as they are by strong popular 

 favor, are a sort of terror to tutors and professors; they compel them 

 to assist or at least to wink at deception and dishonesty. 



It is useless to expect clean athletics when the members of the 

 faculty participate in or condone fraud and unfairness. I do not 

 willingly admit the shortcomings of college officers, but their own 

 confessions can not be gainsaid. I know of no more corrupting influ- 



* Read before the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, 

 Pittsburgh meeting, July, 1902. 



