Priorities on Ivory

A college education is less of a luxury today than it ever was. The existence of the Navy's V-1, V-5, and V-7 plans, and the Army's recently-formed Enlisted Reserve Plan have demonstrated that colleges have a vital part to play in our war effort. Men who think immediate service more important than completing their education have the expressed wishes of the Armed Forces to cool their ardor.

Donald Nelson, in his Alumni Bulletin article on "Universities and Conversion to Total War" has said: "This is neither an old man's war nor a young man's war. It is a smart man's war." The job of the university is to provide "smart men," and the peculiar task of the undergraduate school is to give that sort of general training which is a pre-requisite to successful advanced work in any special field. This liberal arts training should help men to see where they are going before they start out, it should give them a grasp of broad principles which can keep them from bogging down in details, and it should prepare them for the tremendous work of reconstruction when the war is over.

If the Army and the Navy wanted to give their officer candidates specific technical training, it had better places to send them than the colleges. But it was to get the special advantages offered by those colleges that deferred enlistment plans were set up. Students would hardly be serving their country best, if they did not recognize this situation, and plan their courses accordingly. The Reserve plans, it is true, require or suggest one or two math or physics courses. However, they make up only a very small part of a man's program, and new Freshmen particularly need not concern themselves with these requirements at least until the end of their first semester, since there will be plenty of time to prepare for special examinations, and to complete requirements, in the semesters that follow.

It would be trite to say that a course of study must be planned in the light of the war. No college has been able to avoid the war's impact. But it is not yet trite to point out that planning such a course of study does not mean choosing only courses in math and physics, with perhaps a little military Japanese thrown in. Liberal education has the special virtue of flexibility and breadth sufficient to cope with abnormal situations. It changes gradually, as the main lines of thought shift from age to age, but it is adaptable as its stands, to cope with emergencies. War is an unending succession of emergencies, and a mechanical mind cannot hope to deal with them successfully.

But there is an added significance in the preservation of the humane tradition. The values for which that tradition stands are the values for which we are fighting. Without them our war effort becomes a brute struggle for existence, and the prospects for the world after the war are grim indeed. And "preservation" does not imply a resurrection of the status quo. Rather it means holding on to the tools with which we can undertake the tremendous task of post-war reconstruction.

The entering Freshman in the twenties found "college life" ample justification for getting a college education. The Freshman of the thirties was a more serious fellow, anxious to find in his courses the solution to the problems which beset his era. Towards the end of the decade he began to wonder whether that solution really existed. Now that war has climaxed the debacle, the Freshman of the forties is tempted to see in it the ultimate expression of his problems, and to feel that military victory is the final answer, military effort the final method. But the war is only the latest and most terrible symptom of a deeper and more complex disease. Today's Freshmen must learn not only to fight but to think.