Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/169

 The athlete in college was not always so worthy of emulation as he is at present. I do not have to go back farther than my own college days nor even s0 far as that to recall instances of men who found their way into colleges for the sole purpose of developing or exhibiting their physical powers, of making an athletic team, and without any intention of adding to their intellectual strength. Mr. George Ade's crude young Hercules in the "College Widow" whose ostensible purpose in entering college was the study of art but whose real object was to help make a winning football team, might find a counterpart in many another college. I myself can recall a big hulk of human bull who had been employed about town in driving an ice wagon and who was drafted by a few local enthusiasts to enter college in order that he might play center on the football team. He was a crudely impossible yokel, and unfortunately of little use, for he had no brains to manage his brawn, and proved more of a hindrance than a help. Such proceedings as his are happily at an end in self-respecting colleges, and the athlete of to-day is a very different character morally and scholastically than he once was. For membership on one of the Middle-West conference teams, at least, a man must be a bona-fide student, must be in good standing, and must have carried a full year's college work in the institution which he wishes to represent. Our own athletes for years have maintained a scholastic standing considerably above that of the average man in college and in many cases, in fact proportionately in quite as many cases as the men not in athletics, have attained a standing which has entitled them to elec-