Ohio University - Athena Yearbook (Athens, OH)

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I am most appreciative of the honor done me by the dedication of this ATHENA in the first year of my admin- istration at Ohio University. The publication of a university or college annual is one of the oldest traditions in the American college and univer- sity world. Like many another collegiate tradition, it has come increasingly under critical scrutiny, and many voices have been raised, especially in the difficult years of the depression, against its continuance. There can be no valid objection to the periodical or indeed continuous re-evaluation of any phase of college life, especially per- PRESIDENT: haps of its most cherished traditions . Indeed, it is not impossible that an institution should, like the allegorical organism, completely change its skin, at least, every seven years. Inefficiency, infantilism, and indignity are among the minor counts in the indictment of the college annual as a traditional phenomenon. Among more serious charges can be listed graft and incongruity. Some or all of these short- comings have at various times and places no doubt reared their ugly heads. None of them is inherent or ineradicable, unless it be the fundamental defect of incongruity, if that

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count be proven. The others have as a matter of fact been eliminated with greater or less success, and could easily be removed from the picture altogether. What of the charge that the publication of a pictured annual depicting the events of each college year in the form of an illustrated chronicle is undignified and incom- patable with a grown-up conception of college or university The answer to that seems to be that as long as college or university life is something more than merely preparation for and attendance at classes, or perhaps even completion of work by correspondence or by advanced standing in examinations, the annual is a logical and proper concom- itant of those other phases of American college or university life. Institutions that, under the pressure of economic neces- sity or because of a maturity complex, have abandoned the publication of an annual, have discovered that as long as they were a college or university community , made up largely of young men and women in their late ' teens and early twenties, the ormssion of the college annual left a dis- tinct and regrettable void. So I venture to express the hope and conviction that this ATHENA and its successors will continue to fill in the most satisfactory fashion possible the unquestionable role that may be theirs in the continuing play of the college stage