FORECAST FOR '47

President Conant's Chapel speech is noteworthy for its bluntness. Saying little that has not been implied before, it nevertheless confirms authoritatively what every college student has anticipated: perhaps by February, certainly by June, the peacetime function of the colleges will be incompatible with the demands of total war. The storm signals have been out for months, but students and faculty members have clung to the hope that the colleges might preserve the liberal tradition. President Conant's plan for the war colleges recognize the futility of that hope.

The President's plan is not designed to preserve Harvard's liberal tradition. A program proposing that one-third to one-half of our high school graduates be sent to "the most convenient college (on a quota basis)" to study a "nine to twelve months' course directed toward English Composition, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and American History" is not merely a wartime compromise of a peacetime ideal. It is not the English system of wartime education, which allows men one year in college to study as they please. It is rather a proposal that the colleges as we have known them close their doors until the end of the war, and that their classrooms, dormitories, and staffs be devoted to "indoctrination" at a pre-commission level. Such a program does not even salvage the old Freshman year; instead it is an extension of precollege education, an additional year of high school.

This is a conversion as complete and necessary as that of American industry. A fighting force of thirteen million men will absorb practically all men eligible for college training. Without students there can be no universities, but college facilities, like those of industry, can be converted for war. If the modern Army calls for men acquainted with machines and complex technical apparatus, the colleges must provide them. If modern war calls for men sufficiently versed in their history to know for what they fight, the colleges can supply them.

"Indoctrination" is an ugly word. It is neither a liberal education nor a substitute for one. Those now in college have an obligation to make the most of an opportunity soon to be closed, for in war as in peace the liberal background is a gift of incalculable value. Only a plan like President Conant's can ensure the continued use of university facilities when the guns are ready and the college men are called.