A SEVENTEEN-YEAR TRUST

The news that Dean LeBaron Russell Briggs has resigned from the Chairmanship of the Athletic Committee focuses attention on the service which he has been quietly performing for seventeen years. Appointed to this position when, as Mr. D. S. Brigham points out elsewhere, college athletics were being hotly discussed with reference to professionalism, schedules, coaches, and so on, Dean Briggs was largely instrumental in deciding the future course of Harvard athletics so wisely that, looking backwards, one sees an era of exceptional calm, and--despite occasional flashes--of general athletic good feeling.

To steer successfully between the Seylla of graduate and undergraduate hopes of victory and the Charybdis of ever-ready denunciation on the score of "over-emphasis" requires a master hand. Surpassing even the crafty Ulysses, Dean Briggs has made sacrifices neither to the one nor to the other. It is true that the golden age of the Haughton regime made the football seasons more than satisfactory to the students and alumni--but in other sports there was no overwhelming superiority to lull would-be dissenters into "innocuous desuetude". Having a clear idea, however, of the place which athletics ought to occupy in college, or more especially, at Harvard, Dean Briggs has by constant practical exemplification of this idea, actually created a tradition, which in all likelihood will determine the University's policy for some time.

Not, of course, that there have been no storms, no periodic tempests to disturb the tranquility of Dean Briggs' administration. There have been a few,--quite recently--but they have been weathered to the satisfaction of everybody but the most hypercritical. Most important to the individual, the benefits of competitive athletics--often attacked and even denied--have been preserved and democratized; while the feeling of good sportsmanship with other colleges has been carefully nourished and encouraged. During his long guardianship Dean Briggs has brought University athletics to a condition of which he may well feel proud, and for which the University owes no little gratitude.