Organizations: N.C.A.A. Go Home

So what if the Ivy League doesn't exactly scare Notre Dame in football? Columbia's fencers are the best in the U.S. So, probably, are Yale's swimmers: what other team can boast a man (Don Schollander) who won four gold medals at the 1964 Olympics? Then there are Cornell's hockey players and Pennsylvania's league champion basketball team. From now on, though, nobody will know for sure how good any of the Ivy athletes are—because last week the league angrily withdrew from all N.C.A.A. championship competition.

Cause of the Ivy defection was a regulation, adopted at last year's N.C.A.A. convention, barring athletes with academic averages below 1.6 (out of a possible 4) from N.C.A.A.-sponsored events. A 1.6 average is equivalent to a C—,and the rule sounds reasonable enough. But is an A in "recreation" at Wayout State, say, equivalent to a D in comparative philology at Harvard? And, more important, what about the principle involved? As Princeton's President Robert Goheen put it, the Ivies do not believe that "an athletic organization should seek to determine academic policy." At last count, more than 100 other schools (out of 573 N.C.A.A. members) were supporting the Ivy stand by ignoring the N.C.A.A. rule.