“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 But the Conference two years ago repealed the provision in the Graham Plan barring subsidies by alumni, and last week it appeared that there was nothing Dr.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