STUDENT MIDSHIPMEN

This morning, when Harvard athletes of four different sports are filling in the bottom layer of three score suitcases, when the cast of "Not Now--Later" is divided in attention between last classes and packing Puritan costumes, when all the undergraduate world seems to have a train schedule in its hand, there are eight Sophomores who will have none of this. They will steady themselves on the deck of the battleship Utah as she bucks the tides of the island-dotted lower harbor of Boston. The Utah is bound for the trial courses off the Maine coast; as members of her crew these eight students will be not merely witnesses, but participants in naval manoeuvre.

One of the most agreeable features of the advent of Naval Science to Harvard has been the spirit of practicability which has permeated even the first year of the course. The presence this week of students in Harvard College in the crew of a United States battleship is not an innovation; there were similar trips last spring for the Freshmen registered in Naval Science 1. Eagle Boats took parties on a week end course of instruction, and late in June fifteen students cruised south to Annapolis. The satisfactory completion of a novitiate that included long vigils on watch and five hour stretches of stoking in the boiler room has made it probable that part of the Harvard Naval group will make a trip this June to either the Bahamas or the Bermudas.

The establishment at Harvard in the fall of 1926 of the naval science unit was part of a great experiment, simultaneously engineered by the government at Yale, Georgia Tech and in a number of colleges on the Pacific Coast. It is yet too early for judgement of the experiment in the same definite terms which made ascertainable the success of the corresponding venture in military science. Marked, however, by the shaping of study to the pleasure as well as profit of the student, the nearing close of the second year of naval science at Harvard may be said to have given it prestige among those who know the course, and respect among those who see it assuming form as an integral part of the Harvard curriculum.