ll students in some
form of outdoor games, and toward this those who have the best interest
of inter-collegiate athletics at heart are working. A Department of
Intramural Athletics has been established for some time, which seeks to
develop a general interest in all kinds of sport;--tennis, for which
Ferry Field is admirably equipped with eighteen courts, boxing,
gymnastics, swimming, cross-country running, hockey, indoor baseball and
hand-ball, to say nothing of an increasing emphasis on class and
fraternity football, base-ball, and basket-ball teams.

The difficulty which faces those who seek to develop this programme to
its utmost lies in the attitude of many students and alumni, whose sole
interest in the University is to see that she maintains winning teams.
They fail to see that there is more in the annual "big game" than nine
or eleven supreme athletes brought together to "represent" the
University. Fortunately there are many more who view the whole question
in its proper perspective, men who are no less thrilled by the
contagious enthusiasm of the annual big games, and who recognize them as
an inevitable and not undesirable factor in our college life, but who
seek to bring athletics into a sane and wholesome relationship with the
academic life of our universities. That is the principal consideration
which underlies all the discussions which have arisen in the past and
which are inevitable in the future,--as long as American youth, on the
one hand, maintains its vigorous and enterprising spirit, and our
universities, on the other hand, insist on their prerogative as
institutions where fundamentally the things of the spirit must rule.

CHAPTER XII

TOWN AND CAMPUS

It was a happy stroke of fortune that fixed Ann Arbor as the location of
the University of Michigan. A literal interpretation of history may
suggest that politics and speculation had their share in the selection
of the site, but these factors might have operated quite as easily in
favor of some other Michigan village. The fact remains that Ann Arbor
was chosen. This assured to the University an individuality and an
opportunity for self-realization that might have been lost if a town
destined to a more rapid expansion had been selected. It has given
Michigan a special character among most of the larger American
universities and has had a vital influence on the development of the
institution, which has grown proportionately far more than the to