Normalcy in Denver

When Albert C. Jacobs, onetime provost of Columbia University, took over as chancellor of the University of Denver in 1949, he found D.U. overcrowded, overextended and musclebound. In four years he slashed away about 300 marginal and vocational courses; he streamlined his departments, earmarked the alumni fund for faculty salaries, started a whole new policy of education first and athletics second. The result of his efforts: D.U. began to climb academically, but Chancellor Jacobs' popularity plummeted wildly.

D.U. alumni did not really mind his emphasis on brains, but they heartily resented his neglect of brawn. He flatly refused to recruit athletes, forced the Denver Pioneer Club to stop talent-scouting for high-school stars, frowned on the weekly pep luncheons of the Quarterback Club. Annual attendance at football games fell from 110,000 to 50,000, and at one game hit a low of 3,500. Last year things got so bad that D.U. lost every one of its seven Mountain States Conference games.

Last week, as Jacobs left Denver to take up a more congenial post as president of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., D.U. alumni wasted no time in proclaiming a new era. The Pioneer Club was already back in the talent-scouting business, and the Nugget Boosters Club gave a special luncheon to honor the Denver Post's Sportswriter Jack Carberry for being the faithful apostle of D.U. athletics. Said Carberry: "The hilltop school has really and truly come out of the dream cloud in which, athletically speaking, it has been sleeping." Said Robert W. Selig, chairman of the board of trustees and an executive of Fox Intermountain Theaters: "We have started with a new regime. We have a winning policy . . . We will . . . attract students with athletic abilities to our campus. We know you can't pull a wagon without horses."

Selig insisted that he was not exactly out to buy the horses. He had, he announced, a better idea. His own company had just "adopted a University of Denver athlete . . . We will father him through four years . . . We are going to give him a job." Selig asked that other Boosters follow his company's example. "Adopt a boy," he cried. "Make him a real son . . . Do that for his full four years of school, in defeat as well as in victory."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.