Credit Credo

Outside of a choice vocabulary, a wartime course on the intricacies of slit-trench excavation bears little fruit for the veteran studying English at Harvard. College men bowed gracefully to military instruction and promptly forgot it. But now, as civilian students, ex-G.I.'s find that wartime studies loom huge on their credit sheets with decimal figures that pare college time to the bone. The Dean's office must step high to escape the hoard of snapping students with unwanted, but usually irrevocable service credits.

There is an excellent educational argument against giving college credit for military training. Bowdoin and a few other colleges refuse military instruction on the grounds that it in no way approximates University study. Harvard, on the other hand, reasoned that since the college had been offering course credit for R.O.T.C. training since 1920, Army or Navy work must be allowed. For this reason, and to speed-up students who lost from one to five years in the service, the Administration would count one full term or its equivalent at a recognized school as a term at Harvard.

During the terrific crush of the first post-war years, students found themselves effectively impaled on their War Service Credits. This year, with some of the pressure off the Dean's office and the Registrar, refusing all February applications, undergraduates can expect some relief. Honors candidates and students who graduate with less than eight terms of college will be allowed to waive their service credits and stay on until they can complete four full years of college. Each case will be judged by a man's genuine educational drive and on the applicability of his non-college training.

While the more liberal system will aid a great many students, veterans with large numbers of technical school credits and those men who have changed their pre-war Concentration fields are no better off than before. Under the new program two terms of technical school still approximate college. Air Corps, A.S.T.P., and Navy V-5 programs dispense useless, but indelible credits and a student graduates with an education composed of one part dive-bombing and three parts Philosophy.

The man who eagerly embraced Chemistry in 1940 with an eye to an Army commission, but now wants to study Languages sits on the hottest part of the griddle. What seemed expedient in wartime now becomes useless for Concentration. Science credits plus service work combine in a knotty problem that leaves the student frustrated and angry. Since the problems of men with less than eight terms at college have been so effectively solved, the future would indicate an attempt to aid those who, technically, have received a full education, but cannot quite resign themselves to it.