Minimum Education

Sometime around the spring term of 1943, the last vestiges of "education as usual" went out the wartime window at Harvard as in other schools. The program of sixteen courses and eight terms of study for an A.B. or S.B. disappeared down the maw of preinduction acceleration. A twelve-week summer term became an established institution, and, later, for the great majority of students then in the services, a system of war service credits was instituted. Credit towards one's degree was offered for such diverse subjects as basic training, meteorology, and Japanese.

Most students considered it a wonderful idea--during wartime. For those unable to return to complete their full course or for students who planned to enter graduate school, war service credits were bread from the skies, but for others, accepting the credits means a further shortening of an education that has come to mean little more than a prescribed number of course credits. Members of the ROTC and NROTC programs are especially affected, since as many as five or six of their courses are little more than filler. Candidates for honors, equally hard hit by the ruling of the Administrative Board that war service credits must be accepted, are returning to college to find that concentration requirements, divisional examinations and honors theses must all be hurdled within the one or two remaining terms allotted them by the University. For many students, military science is now the major field of concentration.

The problem lies in the fact that a wartime minimum has become a peacetime maximum. The Administrative Board, faced with unparalleled enrollments and equally large numbers of applications for admission, has tried to spread educational benefits as widely as possible, permitting waivers of war service credits in only a few exceptional cases. A diluted education, however, is no substitute for the real article, especially since so many of today's students have already had their educations interrupted and misshapen by the events of the past six years. Accepting war service credits should be a matter of choice, rather than of compulsion, resting with the individual. Course credits traditionally have constituted the smallest part of a Harvard education, and the necessities of peace demand a return to former, and notable, standards.