The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-05-25
HARVARD vs. YALE
Worried Graduate of Cambridge Uni
 vsrsity Claims Precedence.

vsrsity Claims Precedence.
 The following letter in the Boston Advertiser. from the pen of a Bangor man. a graduate of Harvard in the class of 's4. will undoubtedly be of in- terest to every Harvard or Yale man who reads it:
 To the Editor of the Boston Adverti-
 ser:
 Will you now allow an old reader to inquire why your writers persistently use the expression the Yale-Harvard game, instead of the Harvard-Yale game. A stranger visiting this country and knowing nothing about the rank of our universities would suppose from the former expression that Yale was the leading institution of the two. But Harvard is seventy-hve years older than Yale, has about twice as many living graduates. six thousand students and Yale about three thousand. liar yard also has larger faculty and more distinguished men than Yale. Harvard's facilities for work and study cover a very much wider field than
 Yale's do; also Harvard has very much larger financial resources than Yale has. The statistics in Harvard's favor could be quoted at greater length. but will close with mentioning one item. In the Harvard Law school there are between sixty and seventy graduates of Yale; there is also large number of Yale men in the Medical school, and all told there are in the neighborhood of one hundred Yale men completing their education at Harvard. [ do not happen to have Yale's statistics on my desk and don't know how many liar yard men are studying at New Haven
 A couple of years ago I noticed In the New Haven correspondence of a Bos- ton newspaper a joyful announcement that the number of Harvard men at Yale had been doubled over the preced- ing year. had the curiosity to exam inc the Yale catalogue of that year and found that there was just one lone 1 Harvard man at Yale, and he was in the Divinity school.
 I presume that this expression the
 Yale Harvard game is intended as a tribute to Yale's athletic prowess, but l is this the right way to rank a univer- sity? If this be correct then Yale men should always refer to their boating contest with Yale as the Cornell Yale race, for Yale has never won one sin gle race from Cornell and neither has
 Harvard Holy Cross invariably de- feats Yale at baseball and the Yalen- sian logic ought then to make It Holy
 Cross Yale game. Princeton has beat en Yale steadily in baseball for many
 years now and is pretty close up to Yale in football. I should think it would be confusing to speak of the Yale-P Princeton game one year only to reverse the order of next year if
 Princeton wins and call 1t the Prince ton Yale game.
 To follow this style of reasoning a | little further it should be now that Dartmouth- Harvard football game, for
 John Harvard has not yet recovered ], the football championship from Daniel Webster. Another complication arises;
 Eli Yale refuses to meet Daniel Web ster on the football field for the simple
 reason that Daniel is putting up mighty game. In the contingency of a meeting on the gridiron between Hi l and Daniel. what are we going to say, the Yale- Dartmouth game or the Dart
 mouth Yale game?
 The president of Colgate university visited Boston the other day and in his l speech before the alumni association
 caused ,prodigious rejoicing by an
 nouncing that Colgate had won the
 championship in basketball over Har- yard. Yale and Princeton. Here is an
 other complication. If more dreadful l things like this happen we must be
 very careful to speak of the Colgate ] Harvard game, the Colgate Yale game
 and so on to the end. Like the plot of
 one of Gilbert & sullivan's comic ope-
 ras, where will we 'be at?''
 l I am an old-fashioned college man
 and still believe that the primary bus mess of the university and college is l intellectual education. I would, there-
 fore, see our universities and colleges
 ranked according to their scholastic I status. Englishmen always speak of
 the Oxford Cambridge game or
 contest, They give Oxford the prefer
 ence because It Is the elder of the two
 and the leader in the field of study. Harvard is our leading university and
 should be ranked accordingly, and not
 by sporting reporters It occurs to me Ithat if Harvard wins under the new l dispensation then the same light weight authorities will speak of the Harvard Yale game. If it is necessary
 to hyphenate these two names, certafn- I ly the prestige of scholastic standing,
 education facilities and financial re-
 sources should have greater weight than football or rowing prestige. l Yours truly, l HARVARD, 'S4. I Bangor, Me, March 20. :, ..y r..