HEMENWAY GYMNASIUM

With the completion of the new gymnasium near at hand providing vastly increased facilities for undergraduate indoor sports, a backward glance draws attention to the disposition of the old Hemenway gymnasium. For although this building has been obviously inadequate to the demand, there are numerous opportunities for use, of primary interest to the great body of graduate students, whose heritage in part it will soon become.

In past years, graduate students in the school of law, business and arts and sciences, have benefitted to a limited degree from the space and facilities offered by gymnasium, outside of the hours that necessarily were devoted to undergraduate activity. Basketball leagues, inter-club and inter-school tournaments, gave the graduate student some means of exercise aside from walking the pavements. But with the removal of such undergraduate sports as fencing, wrestling, tumbling and the like to quarters in the new gymnasium, added space and added time will undoubtedly accumulate for the benefit of the graduate student.

It is to be hoped that in the final analysis this opportunity may be of positive benefit, but the medium of supervision and active direction in comprehensive intra-mural programs must play a large part in such development. A single director of intra-mural sports is hardly sufficient to produce a smoothly running system that must not only comprehend the body of undergraduates but the graduates of the various professional schools as well.

If the policy of "athletics for all" inaugurated by Mr. Bingham is to be taken from its largest point of view, the graduate students should be able to look forward in this and future years to a much more competent and comprehensive direction of sport, that the new assets with which they are favored may be enjoyed to the utmost, build the future Harvard, and with the addition of the George F. Baker Foundation the dream of fifteen years seemed near consummation.

The final completion is taking shape in stone and steel with the work on the second unit in the projected House Plan already under way. The Yard will always be the center of historical Harvard but the day when the "Drang nach Charles" finally reaches its consummation and becomes the active center of the University is not far in the future.