Your Boy and the Rotc

by HAROLD W. DODDS

To their SCHOOLBOYS plans to enter who college are now next completing their plans to enter college next fall, the draft and military service loom up as more than a remote theoretical possibility. Should the prospective freshman contemplate ROTC or not? This question will be discussed in thousands of homes between now and next September. It is one that college presidents are asked repeatedly, and parents and students have a right to an answer.

More than 300,000 students, almost one fourth of our male college population, are now enrolled in Army, Navy, and Air Force programs of study. Soon some institutions may find that as many as three fourths of their undergraduates are studying military science. It is expected that approximately 30,000 alumni of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps will be commissioned this year as second lieutenants or ensigns; but the ultimate procurement objective is more than double this number annually.

The total number of training units for all Services is 780, distributed throughout 350 different colleges and universities. In about half of them, including those at all land-grant colleges except one, the twoyear basic course is required for all freshmen and sophomores. In all cases the upper-class advanced course, which leads to a commission on graduation, is voluntary. A student enrolled in ROTC who signs an agreement to serve two years after graduation as a reserve officer receives draft deferment for the period in which he remains in college; provided, however, that he keeps in good standing scholastically in all his subjects and survives successive “disenrollments” of those deemed not to be developing officer qualities. In a good many institutions the attrition rates are, for one reason or another, quite high.

The attitudes of students and faculties towards the necessity and wisdom of civilian-military training on such an unprecedented scale are divided. By some, ROTC is considered to be an opportunity for national service which justifies fully the inroads it makes on normal educational activities. Of all social institutions, it is said, organized higher education should be the quickest to recognize its obligation and the most eager to fulfill it. But others take the opposite view. To them, ROTC is an alien importation, so foreign to the proper atmosphere of a college and so subversive to its timeless purpose as to deserve no place or part in the curriculum. However, on one point the opinions of educators agree. They may differ about ROTC as an element in the education of a civilian or its expediency as an officer training device; but the overwhelming consensus is that the quality of the academic programs is substandard and unbecoming to both the Services and the colleges.

I believe that ROTC is an opportunity which higher education should welcome in this dangerous hour; but equally clear is the need for some prompt reforms in the interest of all parties. Basic to any serious improvement is better understanding on the part of both the military and ihe professors of each other’s requirements and methods.

Copyright 1953, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The function of the ROTC is to provide the large number of active short-term junior officers and a proportion of the longer-term regulars which an active military establishment of 3,700,000 men requires. The Armed Forces contend, and I believe’ correctly, that ROTC offers the most efficient method for finding and training this host of officers.

The contribution of ROTC graduates in time of need was forcefully demonstrated by the part they played in World War II. Without them mobilization would have been delayed by many months. As the war continued and our armies expanded, the reserves supplied the backbone of the officer combat personnel. In action they acquitted themselves with honor and distinction. At the end of hostilities the majority of the Army officers at battalion and company levels were former ROTC’ students. No exhaustive figures are available, but a tabulation of the officers of five veteran combat divisions on June 30, 1944, “showed that 52 percent of the lieutenantcolonels; 82.5 per cent of the majors; 70 per cent of the captains; 26.8 per cent of the first lieutenants, and 9.3 per cent of the second lieutenants were reserve officers”; and of these “90 per cent were ROTC graduates.”

In the light of such a record, is it strange that the government should look to the colleges as the best source of supply of the host of junior officers required to man our cold-war defense program? Experience with the alternative device of Officers’ Candidate Schools has proved much less satisfactory. OCS is the method by which a soldier who has volunteered or been inducted as a private may become an officer. It involves an extra year of service beyond the two years the ROTC graduate must give, for obviously it is not practicable to spend a year in training a man to be an officer if he is to serve but one brief year at commissioned rank. Young Americans are unwilling to volunteer for this extra year merely to share in the kudos and responsibilities of officer rank; and the Armed Forces do not want to draft men to be officers.

When one weighs the alternatives, he has fewer misgivings regarding the ROTC idea in general, although as an educator he may still be unhappy over its operation.

2

THE weaknesses in the military program are particularly acute in institutions of the highest scholastic standards and strongest fidelity to the liberal arts ideal, the very colleges which supply a substantial proportion of the most effective officers and in which the attrition rate between basic and advanced courses is lowest. Unless these weaknesses are remedied to the mutual satisfaction of the Services and the colleges, ROTC’ will continue to be viewed by the faculties, and by many parents and students, as unworthy of our campuses.

It is true, as the Department of Defense assorts, that no college has been forced to accept ROIC’ against its will. Yet colleges as well as people have a lively instinct for self-preservation. When Selective Service threatened to decimate their enrollments, following the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, many actively shopped for ROTC units for the deferment they offered the students; and the demand still exceeds the supply.

Now that we can no longer consider military training as a passing phase fashioned for a temporary emergency, the problem becomes one of how to make room for it in a way that will do justice to the essential requirements of the Armed Forces, with the least possible dilution of normal educational processes.

In justice to the Armed Services it must be said that they appreciate fully that military science is only something added (although an indispensable something) to the general equipment of an officer which the college experience supplies. To be a second lieutenant calls for native intelligence, a trained mind, and a personal capacity for leadership which his men will recognize and respect. American colleges exist for the purpose of cultivating these very qualities. If they are successful, their graduates have the talent, education, and personal equipment for command. In setting up the ROTC system, the Department of Defense has confronted higher education with a challenge it cannot shrug off.

Now let us consider first what the students think and then what the faculties think. Do the students understand why ROTC is necessary?

No dean will argue that the draft is popular with either students or parents; both desire that military service be postponed as long as possible. But on the whole, the undergraduates view their military possibilities calmly, if with some natural concern about an uncertain future; and they can be depended on to adjust realistically to what the country demands of them, with no more grumbling than is good for a soldier in any case. Certainly the charge of some ill-advised oldsters that modern youth lack the courage and the spirit of sacrifice of their fathers is as slanderous as many other gloomy observations of age about youth, which appear to have been common to all generations throughout recorded history.

When we turn to student attitudes towards ROTC in particular, it is clear that the great majority would not be in it except for its draft deferment privilege. As is true of many of their teachers, they are not convinced of its significance and its claims on them as patriots. A potent attraction in colleges and universities which boast units of more than one Service is the chance to choose the arm of the military to which one prefers to belong. Where there is such a choice, the Navy and the Air Force are selected in preference to the Army. The news from Korea, where the Army is bearing the brunt of the hardships and casualties, has not stimulated much ambition to be a foot soldier. The drawing power of the Army has always been weaker than that of the two other branches.

The values of an unbroken four years in college are obvious. There is nothing unwholesome about deferment when the individual knows that in exchange he must serve later as an officer for two years, as his contemporaries do. Yet it would be unjust to American youth to fail to point out that a substantial, if unostentatious, urge towards ROTC lies in a sincere conviction that one can contribute more if he can complete his college education before he is needed. After all, this is only what parents and educators have been telling them all along.

The well-advised young man, weighing the pros and cons of officer training as against serving in the ranks, will not consider two years as an officer to be all loss with no retrievable gains for himself. True, the work of a second lieutenant on active duty will not add to his specialized knowledge of a particular civilian vocation. But if he keeps his eyes open and determines to profit from his chances to mix and work with all sorts of people such as he never met in college, he will learn much that will make him a more successful lawyer, a more knowing banker, a more efficient businessman afterwards; a better teacher if this is the profession he intends to follow, or even a better clergyman.

Students who entered ROTC when the signs in Washington pointed to early general calls for their age group, and who thereby committed themselves to two years of service after graduation, may be forgiven if they ask themselves sometimes whether they didn’t back the wrong horse. They have seen their civilian classmates continuing their normal careers, even moving on into postgraduate and professional schools under the liberal policy of student deferments. It would be only natural if some feel that they were lured into military training by false advertising. Sales campaigns for ROTC recruits have relied too heavily on the deferment privilege; the major appeal has been pitched to private interest. The moving challenge of an exceptional opportunity to be a good citizen has been ignored by the Services, parents, and faculties alike. However, as student draft calls rise next year and increase progressively during the two years thereafter, ROTC will be restored to a more balanced position in the pattern of national military manpower; and this will be good for it.

3

WHEN we come to consider the faculties, we find that they are more unhappy over ROTC than the students. Civilian discipline and military discipline do not mix, it is said; the latter should be postponed until one enters the service, where it rightfully belongs.

This criticism I deem to be without foundation in fact. In part it springs from a conflict in temperament, but in part it is a sort of reflex of professional dissatisfaction with the slight scholastic quality of much of the course material. ROTC students do not live under military discipline; their whole manner of living is civilian. The campus remains distinctly civilian in spirit and the same is true for the officer candidates. Military law is studied but not applied. Military courtesy, smartness at drill, and esprit de corps are taught but they do not set up psychic conflicts in the minds of the student participants. ROTC students are accountable to the faculty and administration of the college, not to their military commandant, who has authority to flunk a boy in a course. But any other faculty member has the same authority in respect to his courses.

The more serious causes of faculty dissatisfaction parallel the criticism of the students to which I referred earlier. They concern the inroads which military science makes on the student’s program of studies and the consequent diversion of time and energy from subjects of greater intellectual stimulus and broader educational range; the substandard quality and slight substance of the courses for which college credit is asked and usually given; and the methods of instruction which are followed.

The encroachment of ROTC upon the civilian curriculum is most acute in those colleges which have departed from the traditional system of the numerical accounting of separate course credits in favor of considered four-year patterns of study. At such places the ROTC student finds that the “free elections” available to him outside his central program are reduced by the hours in his schedule reserved for military courses. This is particularly true when he enters a field of concentration in his upperclass years. It represents an educational sacrifice for many a student who is deprived of interesting opportunities for expanding his intellectual outlook. Naturally the faculty share a corresponding sense of sacrifice in respect to their courses which the students must forgo in favor of military training.

Scholastic credit for military studies is another bone of contention. The Services press naturally for standard credit for their hours of work. It is allowed in the majority of places, usually in the proportion of 15 to 20 per cent of the total academic requirements.

Hours spent on military science represent a subtraction from the time which a student would otherwise devote to normal activities, including his studies. When place is made for it on his class schedule he has fewer hours to give to the remaining corpus of his studies; when it is not he has less time for his over-all program than his civilian classmates enjoy. Either his classes or his extracurricular activities are bound to suffer. We cannot ignore a place for extracurricular enterprise; it is a characteristic and valuable element in the cultivation of the personality for which the American college system strives. Credit or no credit, ROTC cuts into the day’s educational work of a student.

But the basic faculty unrest springs from the knowledge that ROTC subjects are intellectually thin, and that the student’s time is consumed in the dull memorizing of detailed facts. The techniques are of a trade school sort, in contrast to the courses designed to strengthen the muscles of the mind by challenging its interest and stimulating its exercise. The movements of history and their causes and consequences, the evolution of civilizations, the problems of a dynamic social order, the curiosity which science arouses, are more effective to this end than memorizing bare facts. Of course facts are indispensable; they are the stuff with which we think. But memorizing them in a mechanical manner is dull work. At most they remain inert knowledge until one is able to utilize them in associative thinking. The general objection of educators is that the emphasis of ROTC is so exclusively on practical details of the “know how” to the neglect of the complementary “know why.” Moreover, they are convinced by their own professional experience that if properly condensed and presented the subject matter could be conveyed in less time than the Services now demand.

Examples from the ROTC curricula will illustrate the sort of subject matter to which both students and faculties take exception. They are not selected as criticism of specific courses, but as indicative of the atmosphere which pervades ROTC training.

There is one course in which equal allotments of time — six hours — are assigned to first aid and hygiene and to teaching the geographical foundations of national power. The first half covers material usually found in Red Cross courses, oriented to military conditions. Among the “graphical training aids” are the following: “When a fly wipes his foot on your food, he’s spreading disease”; “Don’t be your own doctor”; “Beware, drink only approved water.” The other six-hour segment considers geographical factors, their influence in the division of people into nations, and their effect upon governmental policies, economic development, and war potential. It concludes with the relationships between rivers, harbors, natural resources, water barriers, climate, communications and trade routes, and a nation’s peacetime economy and war potential. It studies the world’s uranium deposits in relation to the atomic bomb, and the effect of the possible discovery of new uranium deposits and other metals. It includes specific analyses of the United States and two other great nations as to their economic power, their war potential, and their inclination and aptitude for war as influenced by geographical factors. A list of source materials, all of adult nature, is given the instructor, but it affords that inexperienced and unhappy man no explicit guide to the selection of text material to aid the students in their formidable six-hour jaunt through these vast geopolitical regions. Surely there are incongruities here.

Courses in administration are designed to introduce the student to those paper procedures by which so much of the business of the Services is transacted. One of them, after an hour devoted to the particular forms of military correspondence, consumes thirteen more of its allotted fifteen hours in the study of the thirty-three forms, reports, and records listed in the syllabus. The course terminates with an examination to determine how much of this the student’s memory has retained.

4

IN REBUTTAL the Department of Defense properly points out that the function of ROTC is to implant in a prospective officer the knowledge of his craft which he must have if he is to function as an officer when he goes on active duty. It reminds us that any specialized profession calls for memorizing a body of exact facts — medical students, for example, have to learn anatomy, and they are apt not to like it in contrast to the more speculative subjects they studied in college. How well a young officer has mastered the details of his training may spell the difference between survival and death for himself and the men under his command. An infantry officer must be able to work a gun; whether he understands the chemistry of explosives is purely incidental to his responsibilities as a platoon leader or company commander. To know what buttons to push on an automatic calculator is more important to a young antiaircraft officer than to comprehend the mathematical theories that made it possible. Admittedly this sort of knowledge or skill is not a normal element of a college education; but this is not to say that as a field of study military science must live in narrow isolation from the academic curriculum. Total war is more than a strictly military problem. The “know why” is an essential element of the “know how,” and should be part of the equipment of an ROTC graduate.

The teachers rightfully argue that modern defense has raised a new set of problems in which civilian and military considerations are intertwined. No longer can the military depend on imported lay personnel to provide ready-made solutions for them. The wise policy is to see that the officers who enter via ROTC bring with them an educational base on which to build an appreciation and grasp of the new socioeconomic military issues which a democratic country confronts when it prepares to defend itself by arms.

The Pentagon is well aware that its military science courses will not enjoy the support of either students or faculty if they are not respectable, on a par with the quality of other work on the campus.

As a step to curing the present deficiencies, the Army and the Air Force are introducing new curricula devised to be more general in nature. Each will allow more room in its schedule for studies of civilian as well as military value. For the present, the Navy is making no sweeping change in its requirement of eight full semesters of Naval Science, which it holds to be the minimum possible for the training of competent ensigns. In support of its position, the Navy points out that as a rule students come to college having no familiarity with the sea; the knowledge which a future ensign must acquire has little counterpart in civilian life; whereas the other Services can build on familiar experience which most young Americans share in common. Nevertheless the Navy is observing the new programs in the Army and Air Force with interest and states a willingness later to consider adjustments towards the faculty viewpoint.

Various colleges and universities are considering plans for better integration of the military subjects with the academic curriculum; and the Army and Air Force authorities have indicated that they welcome pilot experiments. Yale, for example, is exploring the possibilities of a common freshman year for the three ROTCs on its campus, to be taught largely by the civilian faculty and to be concerned with elements of history, geography, and political science. Colgate is considering the wisdom of combining elements of its required area studies program with similar subjects in the Armed Forces program. Other institutions are discussing similar changes.

Princeton, with the full coöperation of the Army and the Air Force, is trying out a limited solution of the problem of integration. Aided by a grant made two years ago by the Rockefeller Foundation, our History Department has constructed from the ground up a new course in military history to occupy one semester of the eight assigned to military subjects. The course is open to civilian students as an elective. The History faculty is pleased with the results of the first trial run. It is not the usual technical history of campaigns and their strategy and tactics. It is rather general history applied to the specific topic of armaments and war. It covers the main developments in the art of war since the cabinet wars of the eighteenth century, and analyzes the broad reciprocal relations between the Armed Forces and the social, political, and economic life of the society of which they are a part. A book of readings has been assembled and a syllabus is in preparation which will be made available to other colleges that may wish to conduct a similar experiment.

I suggest that academic scholarship applied to certain other areas of college may well return some gratifying and perhaps surprising results. Geopolitics is a subject which should repay some inventive effort. The new Air Force curriculum assigns 30 per cent of the contact hours in senior year to Military Aspects of World Political Geography. Experience indicates that the participation of qualified civilian teachers would be helpful. A new course on the Economics of Military Affairs would strengthen an understanding of the strategy of modern war. Economic logistics are as important as military logistics. Officers and civilians alike need fuller knowledge of the economic as well as political uses of manpower and natural resources, and of the impact of military policies upon our economy.

Since the quantity of specialized military knowledge now offered appears adequate to equip young men for commissions, the cure for the scholastic thinness of the curricula is not to load on more of the same stuff. Those colleges which can demonstrate that their students are able to master the requirements of military science in shorter time than is now devoted to it should be permitted to compress it into fewer classroom hours and exercises, and to utilize the hours thus recaptured to deepen the meaning of the program and achieve a more satisfactory integration with the academic program.

One final matter of importance remains to be considered. It is naturally a rare officer who has had previous experience in a college in which the methods of instruction are so dissimilar to those of the Service Academies. Professional life has not equipped him to deal with deans and professors; moreover, the latter are under reciprocal handicaps towards him.

The military faculty desire to teach their subjects well. When it is generously offered, a new military science instructor is quick to welcome aid on teaching methods at the hand of an experienced professor who will spare the time to help. The practice of a twoor three-day pre-season conference between the officer-teachers and representatives of the administration and faculty would work to harmonize the views of both sides.

Apart from certain special professional preparation such as science engineering and medicine, I believe that the highest service a qualified college student can render is to prepare to be an officer. An Army or Navy or Air Force is no better than its officers, and our country needs the best. In so doing he will have to give some of his time to military subjects removed from his major intellectual interests. But, as I have said, the Department of Defense counts heavily on a college education for the basic preparation of junior officers. Accordingly academic deferments are granted to those who enroll in ROTC courses and who continue to demonstrate officer ability as they move through their college years. Anyone to whom such deferment has been granted can be assured that he has placed himself where the country can use him best.

When the pros ond cons are balanced the answer comes out in favor of ROTC.