In the conflict between the claims of the athletic field and the classroom the faculty seems to have stood staunchly by the eligibility rules published in the Catalogue. Team members were generally good students and occasionally included Phi Beta Kappas, Walter Runge and Earl Sweet among them. Though the Athletic Advisory Council, the faculty committee on student organizations, and “Doc”
Huntington supervised the sports programs, the President also kept an eye on them. He had serious reservations about football because of the physical danger to the players and certain elements of “unfairness”
which he found in the game and in 1903 published his criticisms in the North American Review. Later, however, he was more hopeful. He endorsed the national campaign for cleaning up the game which followed President Roosevelt’s luncheon at the White House in 1905 with coaches and physical education directors. The next year Colgate adopted the new rules to eliminate brutality in the game as announced by the National Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee and joined the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, recently formed to secure fair and reasonable college sport.
Throughout their many vicissitudes James c. Colgate maintained a keen interest in all phases of the athletic program, especially football. He gave considerable material aid but even more valued were “his uncloaked enthusiasm, his personal interest in schedule, coach, team and players and his unequivocal championship of the highest ideals of sportsmanship.
From 1886 to 1900 the teams had been identified by the colors orange and maroon but there had developed a wide latitude of shades for each ranging from yellow and crimson to pink and garnet. In the spring of 1900 the Students’ Association and faculty adopted maroon as the Colgate color and filed in the Library a swatch of silk of the correct shade.
President Merrill sought to give special dignity to commencement and other public academic occasions by the wearing of caps and gowns. In 1899 the faculty and trustees adopted his recommendation that gowns be required of seniors and academic regalia requested of the faculty. Shortly before the 1900 commencement he gave an extended chapel address on academic costume and its significance in anticipation of its first formal use at Colgate.
Over the commencement of 1908 hung a cloud of gloom because of