Where Credit Is Due

Scattered individual protests have done little to cool the ardor of the Administrative Board for enforcing the Faculty Policy of compulsory war service credits. Dean Hanford and his assistants have bent backwards enough to recognize the advisability of granting requests to drop credits for basic or boot training; but on top of that minor concession they have started to apply the pressure of officialdom to those men who have not yet submitted their form 100's or equivalent Navy chits on service "education."

No answer has been made to the critics of the forced credit policy, or for that matter to the shortcomings admitted by the very administrators of the design; indeed, the Faculty has not even been offered the chance to reconsider the vote by which it established the procedure.

Thus the situation has remained unfortunately stable for many undergraduates who will leave Harvard this year or next with what they will always consider an unfinished education. Men who left College three or four years ago, cheated by the second World War of what should haver been their undergraduate years, have returned to find that the war has cheated them, too, out of the education which they taught they had been guaranteed.

Faculty and administration men admit the flaws in the policy, grant that fight training and military tactics and naval gunnery are "academic subjects" by only the remotest stretch of the imagination, that history and literature concentrators who are hustled out of college by the credits they received for Army training in mathematics and electronics have not quite achieved their educational goals. But they maintain the position that the sacrifice of a few terms of those men's careers is the lesser of two evils, a necessary method f making room for other worthy suitors for Harvard's opportunities.

The question boils down to a philosophical difference: the Administration feels that giving a hypothetical hundred additional men the chance to come to Harvard is more important than allowing those who are here a real Harvard education according to his own standards. The individual cries for his right to be judged as a student in Harvard College and not as a case history, demands the justice, once he has met the standard of admission, of being permitted to plan his own education--within Faculty guides, but without his efforts in other times counting against him.