END OF THE CHAPTER

With the commemoration today of the 329th anniversary of the birth of John Harvard, the Tercentenary Year sings its official swan song Ushered in a year ago with fanfare and celebration in Sanders Theatre and wafted out this morning by the gentle zephyr of a Chapel service for the founder, the year that has held the mirror up to Harvard's greatness now goes into history. Yet it is typical of the spirit of Harvard's past that the leaders who breathed life into the Tercentenary exercises were thinking not so much of resting on laurel's already won, but of meeting today's challenge to higher education and of making the Harvard of the future a vital center of learning in America.

It is true that the historical heritage of Harvard played a large part in the minds of all who shared in the celebration. The stream of Puritan propaganda from Professor Morison's able pen aroused as much undergraduate indignation about Mistress Eaton's ale and hasty pudding scandals as the student body normal expresses in a Rinehart riot. Rays of past glory were even reflected in the window of a local purveyor, who offered a Tercentenary Cocktail to warm the cockles of your heart after the chilling effects of New England rain in the Tercentenary Theatre. But ghosts from distant times were not the only ones to stalk the stage; the contributions of Eliot and Lowell were in the foreground too, and in the growth of Harvard as a university and of the Tutorial System and House Plan in the college they are fittingly remembered.

But it was not in the futile attitude of antiquarianism or ancestor-worship that Harvard staked its claim to the educational limelight. The year brought challenges, many of which have been successfully met and conquered. Taking up the gage of increasing public indifference to education, the college has spread its tentacles throughout the country, justifying by national scholarships its position as a national institution. In the top brackets of learning, roving professorships promise well to bridge the gaps that modern specialization has brought in wide fields of scholastic endeavor. The symposia of scholars, gathered in September to disseminate their knowledge over the council board, set a precedent that bids fair to have great future importance in the spread of higher learning. The award of degrees to the savants, at which the president pledged the university to the maintenance of the free educational tradition, marked the climax of the year, for in a sense the torch of learning was taken up by new rumors and carried on toward the future. And, even more tickling than the great events within the university, was the political debacle of the man who, more than anyone else, has stood athwart the free educational stream, the present Governor of the Commonwealth.

To President Conant and Mr. Greene have gone just tribute for their part in the Tercentenary Celebration. But from now on the preservation of the vast heritage we have received depends on continued leadership in University Hall. It is to be hoped that, when the Chapel bell tolls in memory of the founder today, it will ring in a new age worthy to carry on the tradition of the "age that is past".