Wolfpack Club shells out for ‘scholarships’

“Because ‘the peculiar advantages of football [to a college] arise only from winning football,’ University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins concluded that he must either: 1) hire a winning team (against Big Ten rules), or 2) abolish football. He abolished football.

“Last week North Carolina Staters decided to try a different system. D. W. (“Dutch”) Seifert and 17 other alumni organized a Wolfpack Club. Its purpose: to hire athletes. Money for athletic ‘scholarships’ will be raised among 20,000 alumni. Wolfpack Leader Seifert gave tongue:

” ‘Subsidizing of athletes has been going on for years in every school of our acquaintance…. The time has come for athletic scholarships to be placed on a businesslike basis, open and aboveboard…. We might as well face the facts. . . . There isn’t a finer agricultural-engineering-textile school anywhere. Yet popular opinion is that the finest schools are those producing the best athletic teams.’

“Most embarrassed was Dr. Frank Porter Graham, who, as president of the University of North Carolina, is also titular head of its subsidiary, North Carolina State. A few years ago Dr. Graham got the Southern Conference to bar subsidization of athletes. But the Conference two years ago repealed the provision in the Graham Plan barring subsidies by alumni, and last week it appeared that there was nothing Dr. Graham could do to keep the Wolfpack away from his door.”

— From Time magazine, Feb. 5, 1940

Weaverville’s ideas had consequences

“Ever since Richard M. Weaver wrote his bracing conservative manifesto in 1948, ‘Ideas Have Consequences,’ the title phrase has been a guiding maxim for the movement.”

— From The New York Times, April 27, 2010

“Weaver found himself, far from his beloved Weaverville, North Carolina, in cruel, heartless, philistine Chicago [teaching at the University of Chicago], where he would do his part to stem what he believed was the descent of America into barbarism….

“Weaver purchased a home in Weaverville for his widowed mother and spent all his summers there, drawing upon the sources of what he believed to be the real and permanent things away from the rarefied atmosphere and urban artificiality…  about which he wrote in ‘Ideas Have Consequences.’

“Disdaining the possibility of getting to Weaverville in a few hours by plane, he always went by train. Before he arrived, his mother would have his garden plowed and ready for him to plant. He would have reminded her to have this done by a horse or mule instead of a tractor.

” ‘There are numberless ways in which  the South disappoints me, [he wrote] but there is something in its sultry languor and in the stubborn humanism of its people… which tells me that for better or worse this is my native land.’ ”

From “Richard M. Weaver, 1910-1963: A Life of the Mind” by Fred Douglas Young (1995)