One-Man Gang

The growing lack of confidence in Mr. Casner's office has begun to alarm 20 University Hall itself. This clearing house for Army and Navy press releases has professed an innocent ignorance of the sources of undergraduate distrust. It has referred part of it to an expectation of upset or vacillating students to have Mr. Casner make their decisions for them; and the element of truth there is undeniable. But this alone obviously does not explain the widespread dissatisfaction. It has begun to get around that would-be officers are almost automatically told about the Business School, the Marine Corps, and V-7; that very little is learned that cannot be found in pamphlets the press, or the heads of fairly-well-informed acquaintances. It has also gotten around that there are opportunities for officer training that Mr. Casner's office either has not seen fit to speak of or else just doesn't know anything about.

Chemists and pre-medical men have been told about the Medical Corps and, in rather vague and general terms, about the Chemical Warfare. They have not been told that men with three courses in chemistry (or three in geology) and a degree can apply for enlistment in an Army aerophotography course at Denver, and that, if they pass the liberal physical requirements, there are commissions awaiting them as Air Corps ground officers. Perhaps this branch of the Army neglected to send a press release to Cambridge. Or maybe Room 20 reserves this information for students who already know it and ask specifically about aerophotography.

Nor have be-glassed Japanese 6b students been told that their eyesight will not keep them from a commission in Navy Intelligence. The Navy naturally has not seen fit to announce in a press release that there is such a shortage of men who know the elements of written Japanese that almost everything but heart trouble and half blindness has been waived to fill the Navy's training course at the University of California. So queries about Japanese 6b have brought reassuring predictions about "great need" and a description of the physical requirements that apply to every branch of the Navy except the Japanese division of the Intelligence.

Over-cautiousness has also kept men from hearing about excellent risks. The Navy has not officially announced that the Japanese course at California will be repeated, nor has the Army announced any future sessions of its metrology course at M. I. T. But the officials connected with both have apparently told all inquirers but Mr. Casner that they are convinced in their own minds that the courses will be repeated again and again unless we beat the Japs next week. Is there any reason why the Fine Arts concentrator who says "What can I do?" cannot, be told that in the past Math 2 plus the declining Army physical minimum has enrolled men as cadet meteorologists, and that the probability of future repetition is excellent? Or that the chances are better than excellent that two math courses and two physics courses will send even Classics concentrators to Craft and the Signal Corps? Such probabilities constitute the most valuable information a student can posses. It doesn't take an elaborate office and a filing cabinet to find out that nothing is certain.

The fault cannot, however, be laid at Mr. Casner's feet. For a man with a heavy teaching load, with administrative duties at the Law School, and with time-consuming connections with the National Guard, he has done an almost super-human job of filing away the bits of information that V-7 and the Marine Corps have bothered to send. There is no reason why he should be expected to make a survey single-handed of the myriad opportunities open to college men, when even the Public Relations office has not found time for it. Any one who has tried to ascertain the relative chances in uncertain fields knows how fantastically difficult it is to find the right man, or to discover who is in charge. Far from being a part-time extracurricular activity for one Law Professor, this endless task can easily occupy the full energies of a large and hard-working committee.

Either the University expects Mr. Casner to be a one-man army on his own time, or else it isn't interested in running anything more than a clearing house where students who don't read the papers can see all the press releases in one neat pile.