Education in Uniform: The Army and Navy Programs for the Colleges
by HAROLD W. DODDS
≫ How much education can we provide for our Army and Navy trainees? And how can we round out that education when the war is over?
1
ON December 12 the long-awaited Army and Navy statement on utilizing the colleges in war training was mailed to college presidents. Although at this writing it is being amended in some respects, it is to be regarded as establishing the basic policies of the government towards the colleges in wartime. For the student who had been standing by, impatiently awaiting his orders, the announcement resolved much confusion and uncertainty. For the colleges it spelled immediate and radical adjustment. By February many colleges will have lost about half their male students. Thereafter enrollments will continue to fall off rapidly as the draft summonses speed up. By July 1 the colleges will be completely converted to war training. From that date the few freshmen too young to be reached by the draft, together with a small number of young men physically disqualified for war service, will constitute the only available pool of male students on normal college programs.
This will obviously be a terrific blow to higher education in America. It can be justified only if the need is overwhelming and the plans for utilizing the colleges are wisely drawn to permit a maximum contribution to winning the war. The differences between the two programs are explained by differences in the needs of the two services. The Navy program has been more favorably received by the colleges because of the greater consideration it pays to general education.
The Army and Navy programs both proceed on the practical assumption that the colleges possess faculty personnel and physical facilities which can be utilized to supplement the inadequate training resources of the services. Their objective is not to save the colleges or to cushion the impact of the ■war upon them. They provide that college students will be treated as everyone else, with no preference that cannot be established by superior capacity demonstrated in screening tests. No more democratic plans have been formulated for any war. And no respect is paid to any “seed corn” philosophy which would reserve the “best brains” of our youth as such from the hazards of combat.
Both services contemplate that the young men to be sent to the colleges will be there in uniform and will receive the normal pay of privates or apprentice seamen. They will live under some degree of military discipline. The Navy will permit its trainees to express preferences among the colleges designated for naval training, and will respect these preferences so far as geographic and other considerations permit. Its trainees will go to college directly from school without a period of basic training at some naval establishment. The Army college trainees will be selected from draftees by means of screening tests to be held during the thirteen weeks of basic military training which is to be required of all.
As this is written, a joint Army, Navy, and War Manpower Commission board is engaged in determining what colleges will participate in the training programs. The methods of selecting the colleges are declared to be as objective as possible. The political pressures arising at this stage, if the designation were on any other basis, can easily be imagined. Those colleges with ample dining halls, dormitories, and scientific laboratories will obviously enjoy an advantage over less favored institutions.
Certain aspects of public policy would dictate that the number of colleges to be designated as training centers be large. On the other hand, considerations of efficiency in administration and quality of training suggest that the number be relatively few and the size of the units relatively large. Doubtless a compromise is being struck between these two points of view. On a most generous basis, however, many small colleges will have to be passed by. The simple truth is that America boasts an educational “plant” at the college level in excess of the need for it for strictly war purposes.
2
The Army and Navy plans differ in important respects. Let us consider the Navy program first. The Navy plan concentrates upon the need of a continuing supply of officer candidates as the war goes on. In its older V-l, V-5, and V-7 Officers Reserve Program, now to be discontinued, the Navy has already enlisted a large number of college and secondary school students for future commissioned officers. The announcement of December 12 does not cancel the arrangement by which these enlisted reservists are to continue in college, at institutions designated by the Navy, until they have completed a total of from six to eight academic terms. Engineering and premedical students in the Navy’s reserve are to be permitted to complete their college preparation for their respective professions at an accelerated tempo.
The new Navy program of December 12 extends a similar opportunity to boys not yet in college. Within quotas to be established, boys wishing to enter the Navy will be sifted and assigned to colleges to follow specified courses to prepare them to become officers. Following a basic course which will include science, mathematics, English, history, and certain specialties such as Navy organization and orientation, the trainees will pursue further college training appropriate to aviation cadets, engineer and deck officers, engineer-specialists, and other naval officers, upon satisfactory completion of the appropriate periods of college training in the Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard. If found qualified when they have completed this second period, they will be commissioned.
The Army, in contrast to the Navy, stresses specialization. Its plan has been controlled in the main by the urgent need for thousands of technicians and specialists for a rapidly expanding force, rather than by consideration of the contribution which the colleges might make towards future officer material. The Army is stressing a basic course which would include mathematics, science, English for military uses, and some history and geography—all at an elementary level. No announcement has yet been made as to who shall take this course or as to the exact purpose it is to serve. It is clear, however, that tlie Army’s emphasis is upon specialties involving little or no general education and designed to produce technicians. Apart from some officer-specialists, the colleges are to have but a small share in educating officers as such.
Only a small fraction of the men in a modern army are officers and the great bulk of Army trainees will naturally become noncommissioned technicians. The need for thousands of specialists in modern war being what it is, the Army’s concern with the training of specialists is natural and proper. Where its program falls short is in lack of adequate general education for those who are expected to proceed to Officer Candidate Schools. In my judgment the prevailing opinion in the War Department underestimates the importance of general education for young officers, even those in the infantry and artillery. It admits the fact that the overwhelming majority of the draftees chosen for officer training to date have been college men, but it explains this by the hypothesis that colleges function more as a selective agency attracting quality rather than as institutions developing quality. Bright boys are more likely to go to college than the dull ones. And it is for this reason, it is asserted, that college men tend to excel in officer qualifications.
That the Army program should have been so strongly influenced by this philosophy is unfortunate. In my opinion a college education really develops leadership and officerlike qualities by methods which cannot be reproduced in the training camps. The qualities of leadership are complex and imponderable. This is not the place to analyze them, but it is my belief that the college still remains our most effective institution for cultivating them in boys of eighteen to twenty. Something over and above specialists’ training is needed to develop gifts of leadership and to equip young officers with an understanding of the issues and the men involved in the war. Rapid survey courses in geography and history will undoubtedly contain information which would be of advantage to every man in the Army, but whether they will convey understanding is another question. The war-aims courses in the last war were not successful, and whether the one projected this time will mean much may be doubted.
The loss to the Army through failure to provide for a more adequate education of boys who will be junior officers two or three years hence may not be felt immediately, since many who will be called at first will have had a reasonable amount of general college education; but as time goes on, officer prospects will tend to be restricted to young men who have had no general education at a truly college level and the loss will then be apparent.
3
Obviously the success of the training programs of both services depends upon the efficacy of the screening tests to be employed when selecting men to go to college, and later when designating those who will continue on for more advanced work. The first screening examinations will include both psychological aptitude tests and personality ratings. The psychological tests will reveal scholarship capacity for quick absorption of new knowledge. The ratings are intended to screen out those who are academically equipped but devoid of the necessary qualifications as to personality. Those who have had a good school training and some college education will naturally enjoy an advantage in the screening process. The records made in the basic course which the Army proposes for a selected proportion of those sent to college will assist in the wise selection of budding scientists, engineers, and doctors. As the young soldiers study elementary mathematics and science certain aptitudes will be revealed that can be stressed; and if a generous factor for error is included in the quotas to be assigned for professional and scientific study, an adequate flow of young men into science and engineering should be possible. The selection of those to be reserved as premedical students will be more difficult. The personal and moral qualities which make a successful physician need time to develop and will be hard to appraise under the conditions prevailing when the designations will have to be made.
As at first announced, the Army training program was justly criticized for its lack of consideration of future doctors and of the needs of industry with respect to future scientists and engineers. All along, the Army has given the impression that it is looking out for its own need first, without adequate consideration of other phases of the war effort. The situation seems now to be on its way to clarification. We may expect further steps by the War Manpower Commission to reconcile the needs of industry with those of the Army. Had the Commission not been so dilatory in assessing the relative needs of the Army and of industry, and in formulating methods by which they could be met, the present confusion concerning civilian manpower and future doctors, engineers, and scientists essential to both military and civilian services could have been avoided. It is now preparing plans to utilize colleges to train both men and women in industry, but this program should have been ready months ago.
Reference has already been made to the Navy Enlisted Reserve composed of college students enrolled in the V-I, V-5, and V-7 programs of officer training. Students enrolled in these programs are to continue in college for from one to six terms, depending on the number of terms completed as of July 1, 1943. These naval reservists will soon be placed on active duty at designated colleges, to continue their education as apprentice seamen with full pay, subsistence, and uniforms.
In contrast to the naval reservists, who will remain in college until they have completed at least six terms, the members of the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps will with some few exceptions be called to active duty and basic military training at the end of the current term. Upon completion of this training these Army reservists will be eligible for selection for officer training or other military duty. This action orders thousands of boys to the service in February who had expected to be allowed to complete their college education as part of the Army program of officer training similar to the Navy V-l and V-7 programs.
The Army Enlisted Reserve Corps was the Army’s answer to the V-l, V-5, and V-7 reserve programs of the Navy which were proving so attractive to college students. When introduced, it seemed to be a reasonable answer to the Army’s problem of how to establish a pool of young officer material to be drawn on two or three years hence to bridge the gap between the number needed then and the smaller number which it was thought the camps could supply. The implications were that these reservists would be permitted to finish their college courses and then would proceed to a number of weeks of basic training, after which, if they were adjudged qualified for officer responsibilities, they would be sent to an Officer Candidate School. The program grew out of past experience with the draftees, in which about 80 per cent of those selected for officer training were college men.
But the experience of the colleges with the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps was not happy. To some people it smacked of special privilege in that it offered college students a leg up towards a commission. Others criticized it as an invitation to avoid the draft since the understanding was that students in the reserve were to be allowed to continue their college courses to graduation. In any case, after the colleges had encouraged thousands of young men to enlist in it, with the expectation that they would remain in college until graduation if their academic work was satisfactory, word came last September that the Corps was to be ordered out in February. True, the War Department had carefully stipulated from the start that the reservists were subject to active duty at any time at the Secretary’s call. Although coming as a surprise to many, it was well within the terms of the enlistment. The liquidation of the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps was indicated the moment the decision was made to raise quickly a big army composed of a much larger percentage of young men able to withstand the rigors of combat.
While the undemocratic nature of the college Enlisted Reserve has been exaggerated by some educational and political spokesmen, the new program which puts everyone through the same mill and which enables both the Army and the Navy to make their selection of young officers on a completely democratic basis without regard to financial resources commends itself to most Americans.
The Army program for the colleges rests on the belief that a big army composed largely of young men is one essential step towards a prompt and merciful end to the war. This position has been attacked by those who argue that a large army will prove impractical and useless and that the colleges are therefore suffering unnecessary dislocation.
I am a staunch believer in the lasting values of education in the liberal arts and I fully realize the social cost involved in any suspension of such education, but I nevertheless believe that it is the duty of the colleges and universities to support the military policy of the government. The cost of losing the war would far transcend the losses involved in the temporary suspension of normal college programs. It is not for college presidents to substitute their discretion for that of the government in regard to the grand strategy of the war.
4
Some have asserted that the Array training program means the end of the liberal arts college in America. Such a view contradicts centuries of human experience. If our colleges deal with timeless values, surely they will survive the violence of the war as they have survived vicissitudes in the past. May we not anticipate a revival of respect for social and humanistic subjects after the war? Have not the Hitler heresies confirmed us anew in the belief that attention to technology must not lead our nation to neglect the values of the will and of the spirit to which a liberal arts education is directed?
One of the great tragedies of war is the loss to the country of some of our most talented youth. But no more futile method for preserving our stock of intellectual leadership can be imagined than to try to shield any class of young men from the hazards of war. What service can brains sheltered in ivory towers when their contemporaries are in combat render the nation afterwards, and how much influence could they exert? This does not mean that brains and extraordinary qualities should be disregarded in the war effort. Obviously, young men so endowed must be directed into channels in which their fullest capacity as scientists and technicians can be employed.
These considerations do not lessen the practical problem of how our colleges are to keep alive. At best the training program will require the services of but a fraction of our faculties. Some of the idle plants can be used for other Army and Navy programs. Many members of our faculties are already in uniform or in some form of essential service. Useful posts can be found for others, but for many who will be left, the future may call for self-sacrifice of a high order. It is generally assumed that the state-supported institutions and the endowed colleges will be better able to ride out the storm than those dependent entirely on student fees. In a measure this is true although, so far as the endowed institutions are concerned, it is to be remembered that many of them are not coeducational and that usually 80 or 90 per cent of their endowment is dedicated to special purposes which may have little relation to wartime needs.
The government is duty-bound to do all it can to make sure that conversion to a war basis does not mean a death sentence to that part of our educational system not required in the war effort. One important step could be announced immediately which would spell hope for the days just after the war. The difficulties of demobilization after the war will be tremendous. The colleges can be very important agencies in the return to civil life of young men many of whom will be quite unprepared to assume its unfamiliar responsibilities. A promise by the government that they will be so employed after the armistice would be appropriate and encouraging. The task of the colleges during the period of demobilization will be as much sociological as educational in the usual sense. They can be made the gateway through which hundreds of thousands of young men can return to take up civilian life.
The process should be largely at government expense and there is no college that cannot be included in it. Moreover, a wise government will prepare plans now for a comprehensive educational program for the period of waiting which thousands of soldiers and sailors will have to undergo between the armistice and their return home. Army and Navy “universities” should be planned for those men who then will be marking time at military posts throughout the world. They will cost money but they will be justified from every social standpoint. Here can be found useful work right away for a considerable staff of experienced teachers in scores of subjects. And it would not be “made work” either.
The thing for the colleges and universities to remember is that they will find themselves by losing themselves in the war effort. Only by so doing can they fit themselves into the whole structure of this war which is a war of the people. If they were to remain aloof in this struggle, they could not claim to be a part of the stream of civilization afterwards.