brought back for a football or a baseball season in the guise of special 

 students. Sometimes they were even surreptitiously paid for their 

 services. 



When the committee began its work, athletics were still in a state 

 of comparative innocence and we followed the theory that it would 

 serve for the training of the undergraduates in management and busi- 

 ness to leave everything, so far as possible, in their hands and exercise 

 the minimum of interference on the part of the Faculty. Our functions 

 were only two: first, to see that the schedule of games and contests 

 should be restricted to a reasonable number, especially those which 

 involved absence from Princeton in term time, and secondly, to make 

 sure that the members of the teams should be bona fide students. With 

 the special student rules being what they were, this second function 

 had little restraining force until the committee recommended, and the 

 Faculty adopted, a regulation that special students should not be eligible 

 to play in intercollegiate games until after a year's residence at Prince- 

 ton. This put a stop to most of the clandestine hiring of players. 



The various abuses to which I have referred were, by no means, pecu- 

 liar to Princeton. In greater or less degree, all the colleges suffered from 

 them. Some institutions, corrupted by the great advertising value of 

 athletic success, made no serious attempt to correct the evils and had no 

 effective eligibility rules. It became necessary to withdraw authority 

 step by step from the students and, especially, to appoint graduate treas- 

 urers to handle the great sums of money that poured in. No single insti- 

 tution felt strong enough to enforce the necessary reforms and, in conse- 

 quence, various intercollegiate bodies were founded, in order to deal 

 with the evils more effectively. These have accomplished much and in 

 Yale, Harvard and Princeton the abuses have been pretty well eradi- 

 cated, though, as the report of the Carnegie Institution shows, they are 

 still lamentably prevalent. Most encouraging of all are the signs that the 

 temperature of the undergraduate body is beginning to decline from 

 its feverish state. When our students take the sensible view regarding 

 athletics which prevails in the English universities, the end of our 

 troubles will be in sight. 



As I no longer had to "spot in chapel," I was freer to leave Princeton 

 and paid much more frequent visits to New York than in the preceding 

 years. When there, I usually took luncheon with the "Ginmill Club," 

 a group of friends who were in the habit of lunching together, though 

 there was no formal organisation. Frank Speir and Moses Taylor Pyne, 

 whom we always called Ingens, Bob Annin, Billy Forbes (Yale '77) 



C 192 3 



