NEW DRAFT PERILS COLLEGE

I am asked the question: How would Harvard be affected if the draft age were lowered to nineteen?

If the draft age were lowered to nineteen, it seems highly probable that Harvard would be overtaken by the same sort of situation as that which has developed during these last three years at Oxford and Cambridge. I have been told that at Oxford at the present moment there are no more than 120 undergraduates; the situation at Cambridge being approximately the same. The dons, or, as we should say, the faculty, have had their incomes from all sources reduced at least one-half or two-thirds in most cases. While it is difficult to estimate situations of this sort before-hand, I should imagine that if the war continues and we raise larger armies with a reduced draft age, the attendance in the College might well drop to three or four hundred students, possibly even lower.

Would Form Military College.

I believe that at the very first symptoms of such a situation arising, the Corporation and Faculty should take radical measures,--measures to safe-guard the University, and at the same time to help the country. I think that there might be formed a military college with a three-years' course on the same general lines as West Point. I would admit boys of the age of sixteen, physically fit, without examination, merely dropping them on their failing to maintain a proper standard in their stud- ies. During their three years in college I should have them under strict military discipline, with a prescribed military course, lectures in the morning, practical work in the afternoon. At the age of nineteen, on completing their studies, they should be well prepared for a second lieutenant's commission, and even if the War Department declined to recognize the school by automatically issuing commissions to its graduates, I think it would be all the better that they should go straight into the ranks for a period that would undoubtedly be short, as their competence would give them their step before long. It seems to me that the University could well afford to say to students who had taken such a course with a view to becoming officers in the army, that at any time after completing it they should be entitled, on taking one more year's specialized work, or an approved program, to proceed to the A.B. degree.

This is, of course, a drastic scheme; but there is nothing the country needs more at the present time than drastic schemes. We are already suffering seriously from half measures. The plan presents difficulties, of course. One is that it requires a good teaching staff; and it would be far from easy to secure the right men. On the other hand, any plan of this sort would have to be put in hand several months in advance, and I cannot believe that it would be impossible, with fair notice, to secure the men we wanted.

It would be especially valuable for Harvard to supply a proportion of young officers whose training had not been an emergency and intensive training, but a thorough preparation. It is further the case that there are many details of military education in which the methods and the science which the Faculty command could be utilized for improving and developing the methods of instruction now in vogue in the army; for these are, in many particulars, much out of date. In other words, Harvard