Vulgarity in Intercollegiate Athletics
Dr. David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, has instructed the committee on athletics of that institution to abolish intercollegiate baseball and football, because of the coarse, vulgar epithets indulged in, flung back and forth from bleacher to diamond. He is convinced that this vulgarity witnessed in the games is not a spontaneous, cheap, and ordinary brand, but a premeditated, cut-and-dried type, which he has defined as "systematic muckerism." One of the faculty says, and he expresses the mind of many others: "I believe that if intercollegiate contests could be carried on with gentlemanly courtesy on both sides, they should be continued. But if the 'win at any cost' spirit is to prevail, then the games can not be stopped too soon." The order in which the students rank their college duties, he says, seems to be "athletics first, studies second."