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March 2, 1942.

Mr. Pred H. Phillips,
Nollend Building, nace
Springfield, Missouri.

My dear Mr. Phillips:

_ Mey I thank you sincerely for yow wonderful letter
as of Pebruary 27th. The fact that you are interested in young
Ralph Bowman to the extent that you wrote me makes me espocially
grateful to you for your kindness.

It may give you somewhat of a shock to learn that

we have never subsidized basketball players here at the University
of Kansas. What I meen by that is giving them jobs earning more
money than a boy can normally earn while attending school. You
were very frank and to the point with me, and I will be the same
with you. It is my contention, and I believe that this contention
is borne out by looking into the matter carefully, that no boy can
earn over $20.00 a month and carry a full load of academic work in
college and also participate in athletic activities.

: 7 ' I ‘kmow there are schools where an athlete can get his

board and room, and sometimes his tuition. There are soft and easy
jobs for basketball players as well as football players, and we are
continuously faced with these men on rival college teams who are
well taken care of with easy jobs.

But I have always been of the notion that while you
get a number of these boys who have exceptional athletic talent, _
most of them when they get easy jobs put their athletics ahead of
their true college education, and many of them fail to make the |
suceess in after life thet they would if the proper emphasis were
- placed on the primal intention of a boy going to college, namely,
study. It is my belief that this war will emphatically deflate
this overemphasis on athletics, and in another year these soft
jobs will not prevail. However, coaches and other followers of
athletics are following the trend of subsidization as strongly now,

apparently, as they were before the war. ;
7

I can say to you very readily that we could get a job
that would pay $20.00 a month. ‘This averages 35¢ an hour for two
hours @ day and work on Saturday morning. This gives a boy time to
study and at the same time, time to play without endangering his