Blood On The Saddle

There's nothing wrong with giving blood, as sound trucks, solicitors and numerous advertisements testify. In fact, it is an excellent thing to do. An attack, therefore, on anything even remotely connected with blood drives must seem outrageous--almost like belching in church.

Yet, if a Housemaster, say, offered to lower room rents for all who pledged their blood, we suspect that the rumblings would be a good deal more than gastronomic. That is precisely the sort of things the three ROTC units are doing. Not content with the usual pressures a charity drive creates, they have added a few intolerable ones of their own.

The Army unit, for example, grants three merits to donors--merits being both marks of distinction and the only means of gaining sought-for privileges. The Navy excuses all donors from one week's worth of drill. These units and the Air Force are circulating sheets for donors to sign, thus in effect making it easier to single out the queasy for purposes of exerting the broadest possible pressure. Even classrooms have occasionally become pressure foundries. Singly, these measures may not be overly offensive; combined, they are.

The inequities in this campaign are obvious. ROTC men who for medical reasons cannot give blood, who have been drained less than six weeks ago (at a time when their generosity did not involve merits and such), who object on some private principle, or who are possessed by phobias against needles they are unjustly deprived of an opportunity for privileges which is available to their colleagues. They are also unjustly subjected to a mass hostility, subtle or blatant as the case may be, which is blind to exceptions.

Worse still, the units are reducing a matter of personal choice to one of crude force. Blood drives, granted, are directed toward goals so manifestly desirable that they justify what otherwise would, at a liberal arts college, be odious in the extreme--but even here, there must be a limit. Bribery and thinly-veiled coercion are will beyond that limit.

Why are the units going so far? For one thing, of all men at Harvard, ROTC officers best understand the great need for blood. This need, however, is not sufficient cause for the military's excesses, especially when the College as a whole is filling its quota so well under solicitation which more or less respects privacy of choice.

Is there an additional reason, then, which might justify the military's action? If its campaign had anything to do with producing good officers, for instance, there would be less reason to gag publicly. But it doesn't. ROTC directives, strongly suggesting that cadets wear uniforms when they give blood, indicate the military's purpose clearly enough. The assignment of special ROTC solicitors to ROTC candidates is also revealing, as are the other small inducements the units have worked up.

These items all point to one conclusion: that as much as the units' campaign is aimed toward more blood-letting, it is also aimed toward the big statistic, the morale-building donation record, the greater glory ROTC. However indignant this does or does not make you, it can scarcely be offered as an excuse for the military's invasion of an area where it emphatically does not belong.