Blue Ribbons On It

When a class leaves Cambridge after its four-year tenure, it scatters bewilderingly and as a whole never returns. No reunion or Yale game ever draws more than a small percentage back. But for the last fifty such groups to depart, there has been one permanent tie to the Square: The Harvard Alumni Bulletin, which has passed through a half-dozen editorships and half a century with the one aim of carrying Harvard to as many of her sons as care to remember.

An alumni publication can be the world's dullest piece of reading. Most magazines of this sort consist of long listings of marriages, births and deaths with little or no current news of the University. Happily the Bulletin has been a far cry from the usual library-cluttering monthly.

Since 1940 its news columns have carried a fortnightly news summary of the University which for clarity and completeness is unexcelled by any Harvard publication. Sports have received their due, and more, in the hands of staffers and student correspondents. Student troubles--such as the War Memorial have brought not only news but editorial support which reaches a readership conservatively set at over 25,000. The award this fall of the Robert Sibley Prize for the best alumni magazine in America brings only deserved recognition to the efforts of editor William Bentinck-Smith '37 and his co-workers.

The Bulletin has new offices, new faces on its staff, new features in its columns as it marks up its fiftieth year of publication. But it has an old tradition of honesty and fine coverage. Its editorial hope that "the Bulletin of tomorrow keep pace with tomorrow" looks like a sure thing.