A DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS

The establishment of the office of Director of Athletics, carrying with it the dignity of membership to the Faculty, is a progressive step which should prove epochal. Its significance can be limited only by the calibre of the man appointed to the position. The Corporation has formally recognized athletics to be an integral part of education. Hitherto athletics and academic pursuits have existed side by side as things apart, separate, distinct, rather than as two phases of the same thing,--the development of the complete man. With the incorporation of the one in the other, the University gives noteworthy recognition of the fact -- which more and more is coming to be acknowledged in American education--that the function of a College should be to produce, not scholars merely, but men broadly developed, complete in every sense, and prepared for lives of active leadership in the world. As long as sports remained only a dangling appurtenance to the academic structure proper, this aim was still far from realization.

Important as this action is in the abstract, even more important is the selection of the man to hold the position. The appointment of a man of the type of William J. Bingham would bring to the office at the outset all the dignity and prestige that should go with its inherent importance. The new Director of Athletics will not be a glorified coach or trainer; he will not be a mere maker of schedules or a business executive. He will be a member of the Faculty with all the prestige of a professor of Greek or History; and rightly so, for his is a province no less important. He will supervise not only intercollegiate athletics but also interclass and intra-mural games. The extension of the athletics-for-all policy will be as much one of his problems as the affairs of a major-sport team. Moreover, he will form a valuable link between the athletic and academic phases of University life.

A position of this sort requires a man who commands the respect of undergraduates, alumni, and Faculty; a man who knows athletics from the stand point of the competitor, the coach, and the administrator; a man who is enough of a friend of athletics to be the first to declare war upon commercialism and wrongful emphasis in intercollegiate sport; a man who is willing to devote himself wholeheartedly to Harvard for the building of the complete man. The selection of Mr. Bingham, or a man of similar qualifications, combining to an unusual degree all these abilities, would insure the success of the new directorship.