"United Nations University"

Julian Huxley, in the current New Republic, supplies a remedy for the seemingly short-sighted wartime policy now followed by American universities. His article points out the fallacy of confining colleges to programs of military preparedness with no thought of the post-war task of helping to organize and reconstruct the world. Huxley suggests that Harvard be transformed into a "United Nations University" devoted to turning out trained men for the period of reconstruction and recovery. The proposed program of study would include both general training at the undergraduate level and specific instruction in the graduate schools and specific instruction in the graduate schools.

Complete transformation is a stiff job, but there is certainly need for some change in the existing University program. At present only one course, Economics 115, is directly concerned with reconstruction. It wanders, however, from the content implied in its title, "Some Programs of Social and Economic Reconstruction." Nor have any of the country's other first-rank universities devoted great efforts to such a program. There is clearly both a need and facilities for an expanded offering at Harvard of specific courses at the graduate level in the cultures, characteristics, and problems of European and Asiatic nations. In recent years the movement of emigrant scholars to Cambridge has provided the University with a distinguished array of experts on foreign countries. A course of study so vitally important to successful completion of national policy would surely attract governmental support, and the system of visiting experts in Littauer's seminars can well be applied to the new field. The students chosen to participate can do so of their own desire, or can be sent here in the same manner as are the military officers studying Physics or Chemistry.

Harvard's tradition of unique contributions to the nation can be continued if its assumes the burden of training the men on whom will fall the task of redesigning a badly shattered international order. Few other universities have either the equipment or the staff, and the opportunity must not be muffed.