A DEPARTMENT OF ATHLETICS.

Dean Briggs offers us a suggestion to solve our perplexities by creating a Department of Athletics. Novel as the idea appears to many, it is, in reality, a very old one, revived in a certain measure, as is pointed out, by some of the Western colleges but tracing its origin to Grecian times, when gymnastics and the liberal arts had an equal part in a young man's training.

We do not yet clearly visualize the activities of any actual department should one be constituted. It would still have to consider the choice between a system of opportunity and a system of compulsion. At the same time we feel that such an alliance between the academic and the athletic functions would remove the ground for some of the criticisms to which the present system is open. For example it has been suggested that the existing arrangement fosters an undesirable spirit of professionalism, of training a few men to a very high degree that they might go through a successful season. This, as Dean Briggs implies, is the natural outcome of paying a coach for the single purpose of shaping a winning team. The day is past when athletics could be viewed by the authorities as a necessary evil. Is it not likely that closer co-operation with the officers of the University would eliminate the narrowness of the "winning team" system and offer us the "more sport and better sport" which we have so anxiously desired?