The Facts Of The Matter

One last word. While I can appreciate the wide national interest in sports, I think it somewhat of an inversion of values that a university can appoint 20 distinguished professors, make broad and significant changes in academic personnel to achieve greater excellence, without attracting more than a slight ripple of attention. But let the same university make a well-considered change in athletic personnel for the same reason, and it sparks the ill-considered charge that it is no longer a first-rate academic institution and must henceforth be considered a football factory.

It seems to me that a little more thought is in order regarding what makes an institution academically first rate. What has relevance here is of a different and higher order—the quality, maturity and seriousness of its students, the intelligence and dedication of its faculty, the significance of its research, the condition of its facilities and, most important, the total and primary commitment of the whole university program to academic excellence. What the university does athletically, assuming it to be in a proper framework, neither adds to nor subtracts anything from these relevant and all-important academic facts. There is no academic virtue in playing mediocre football and no academic vice in winning a game that by all odds one should lose.

It could be and indeed is tragic, however, when a university or a nation puts the greatest importance and interest in those things that are less important in the total scheme of national life. The good need not be, but often is, the enemy of the better. At least in this, we are grateful that SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and others are so interested that we keep our goals in proper perspective.

There has indeed been a surrender at Notre Dame, but it is a surrender to excellence on all fronts, and in this we hope to rise above ourselves with the help of God.