Wolfpack

The University of Chicago won only two football games last season. So did North Carolina State College. Chicago was beaten six times, North Carolina State eight times. Because "the peculiar advantages of football [to a college] arise only from winning football," Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins concluded that he must either: 1) hire a winning team (against Big Ten rules), or 2) abolish football. Last December Dr. Hutchins and his trustees abolished football at Chicago.

Last week North Carolina Staters decided to try a different system. An ardent alumnus named D. W. ("Dutch") Seifert and 17 other alumni (including the college dean, J. W. Harrelson) organized a Wolfpack Club. Its purpose: to hire athletes for the college. Money for athletic "scholarships" will be raised among North Carolina State's 20,000 alumni. Wolfpack Leader Dutch Seifert gave tongue:

"Whether we like it or not, subsidizing of athletes is and has been going on for years in every school of our acquaintance. For the last two years we have endeavored to bring our proselyting activities out from under the table. . . . We believe that the time has come for athletic scholarships to be placed on a businesslike basis, open and aboveboard. . . . We might as well face the facts. . . . There isn't a finer agricultural-engineering-textile school anywhere. Yet popular opinion is that the finest schools are those producing the best athletic teams."

That popular opinion is divided on that question quickly became manifest. Some sports writers applauded, some raised eyebrows. Chicago reprinted and sent to its alumni an article in The American Mercury by John R. Tunis, who described many a shady practice, charged that U. S. college football was "an unsavory racket."

Most embarrassed was Dr. Frank Porter Graham, who, as president of the University of North Carolina, is also titular head of its subsidiary, North Carolina State. A few years ago Dr. Graham got the Southern Conference to bar subsidization of athletes. But the Conference two years ago repealed the provision in the Graham Plan barring subsidies by alumni, and last week it appeared that there was nothing Dr. Graham could do to keep the Wolfpack away from his door.

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