Watson to Quit as Dean, Become Athletic Director

Robert B. Watson '37 will resign in June to become director of Athletics. He has been dean of Students for 12 years. No successor has been announced.

Watson will succeed Aldolph W. Samborski '25 on September 1 as director of Athletics. Samborski has been with the Harvard athletic department since 1927, director since 1963.

Watson is no stranger to the Harvard athletic bureaucracy. He has been chairman of the Faculty Committee on Athletic Sports since 1963 and a member of the Ivy Group committee on coordination and eligibility since 1946. He was acting director of Athletics in 1960-61. As an undergraduate, Watson lettered in varsity football and crew.

Although he takes over as athletics director September 1, Watson said he plans to leave after a couple of weeks to travel to the Far East and handle some personal affairs. He said he hopes Samborski will stay on as acting director of Athletics until around February by which time he will be back on the job full-time.

Watson said he told Dean Ford in October of 1968 that he wanted to resign as dean of Students at the end of this year.

"I've been a dean here for 24 years and my duties have been growing and growing," Watson said yesterday. "In this period of unrest, it would be better to have a younger man." Watson is 56.

As dean of Students, Watson is in charge of such things as student activities and organizations, and student housing. He also has a lot of special duties throughout the year. "Assigning freshmen to the Houses each spring," Watson recalled, "now there's a miserable job."

Watson speculated that the dean of the Faculty may want to assign some of his duties to several different people, or even eliminate the job-as it has been eliminated or renamed several times in the past.

"But it's not for me to tell the higher-ups what to do," he said. "It's not right for an administrator to have a voice in who succeeds him."

Watson said that the director of Athletics will have some serious problems to contend with in the next few years. Among them, he said, are merging Radcliffe sports activities into the Harvard athletic department, and planning to build more badly needed indoor athletic facilities

Watson said that when he decided to resign, he turned down several offers to return to his previous occupation as a Wall Street banker.

"I wanted to stay at Harvard," he said, "because the challenge is here. I look forward to an exciting job ahead in the athletic department."