The Headmaster's Dilemma by Louis Auchincloss Page A

football field, but new wooden stands for onlookers were specified. The tennis and squash courts were not changed.
    "Well, if ever a gift horse was stared in the mouth, this is it," Donald expostulated.
    "That equine is being saved a great deal of money," Michael assured him.
    "And since when did I ask you to be my treasurer?"
    "You didn't, of course. But you can hardly expect a headmaster to hold his tongue when he sees the basic character of his institution being altered."
    "I expect a headmaster not to hurl a donor's money back in his face! My project will put this school right up at the top of the New England prep schools where it belongs!"
    "We have been into that already, Don. You and I will never see eye to eye, I fear. We must leave the decision to the board."
    "And how do you propose to persuade them that my plan changes the character of the school?"
    "If they don't see it themselves, I'm afraid I can't. Your plan, by placing the major emphasis of Averhill on sports, or at least giving it that appearance, is fundamentally anti-intellectual. Appearances are only too apt to become realities."
    "And all this you deduce from the simple improvement of the athletic facilities available to students?"
    "It goes deeper than that, Donald." Michael's dry, cool, impassive tone angered the chairman, suggesting as it did that if his interlocutor would only divest himself of vulgar prejudices for a minute he would have to agree. "A worship of sports can be a challenge to the basic aims of academe. Instead of individual thinking, instead of a fearless questioning of even the most accepted principles, the cult of the muscle and competitive games looks to robotlike teamwork and subservience to a leader."
    "You would abolish athletics altogether?" Donald glimpsed an argument that could destroy the headmaster.
    "Certainly not. I used the word "cult" advisedly. The emphasis on athletics, like most academic affairs, is a matter of degree. I do not think it's irrelevant to keep in mind that dictatorships have always favored sports as a convenient way of drilling young men into tightly organized and obedient units. I may be oversensitive but I sometimes catch a faint whiff of
Heil Hitler
in the roar of a crowd in a stadium."
    "Are you calling me a fascist, Sayre?"
    "I'm simply pointing out that there's a bit of that in all of us. We have to watch it. I myself find even the power of a schoolmaster a dangerous instrument."
    "You'll find it that if you try to use it against my board of trustees."
    "Some of whom already deplore your frank espousal of the late Senator McCarthy's views."
    "Oh, you discuss that with them, do you? No doubt some of the younger ones have been brainwashed by indurated liberals who refuse to credit the infiltration of our government by reds. But if you think you're going to get anywhere with that crap with the sounder members of our board, you're riding for a fall."
    Michael was at least aroused to an argument ad hominem. "Which of us fought in Vietnam, Donald?"
    "With that I'll leave you!" the other exclaimed wrathfully. "It's useless for me to discuss the matter further with you. We can leave it to the board."
    And he strode out of the room.
    "What it really gets down to," Michael explained to Ione that night, "is who's going to run Averhill, him or me."
    "What a curious man he is," she mused. "Why, with his millions, does he care so?"
    "Ah, that's his whole life."
    It was. Or an essential part of it. Donald's first hard battle in life had been at Averhill, and he liked to think he had won it, though only after a considerable struggle. The struggle had come as a rough shock to him, for up to his boarding school entry age of thirteen he had ruled the roost as eldest son in the big square brownstone mansion on Sixtieth Street with its fringe of Egyptian hieroglyphics on the façade and which, unusually for Manhattan, had been occupied by more than one generation of Spencers. Donald's parents had shared it with his