Arms and the Humanist

Many educators have long regarded the ROTC program as an operational blessing and an educational curse. Although it has enabled students to stay in school despite a heavy draft call, its curriculum, they have said, has not fit into the liberal arts program. ROTC courses have been too dull, too detailed. Instead of giving students a chance to flex their minds, they have stressed memorization and routine. At Harvard, for example, this kind of course in the past has taken up four of the seventeen course credits an ROTC man needs to graduate.

Because of this, a number of people have been contacting ways to add a more intellectual flavor to the ROTC program. Princeton has tried a one credit course in the history of war, taught by civilian members of the faculty. Today, we learn that the local Military Science staff plans a step or two in that direction. Col. Dupuy has announced a course condensing technical matter and adding a touch of the liberal arts. It will be taught, however, by the military.

Both complaints and reactions are based on a weak premise: that a liberal education and military training have something in common. Although President Dodds of Princeton, writing in this month's Atlantic, supported the Princeton plan, his own reasoning shows this weakness. He says:

"The techniques (of RTOC) are of a trade school sort, in contrast to the courses designed to strengthen the muscles of the mind by challenging its interest and stimulating its exercise. The movements of history.....the problems of a dynamic social order, the curiosity that science arouses, are more effective to this end than memorizing bare facts. ......The general objection of educators is that the emphasis of ROTC is so exclusively on practical details of the "know how" to the neglect of the complimentary "know why".

It seems strange, therefore, to criticize what is essentially a vocational program by the standards of the liberal arts. In normal times, ROTC with credit would have no place at a liberal arts college. Today, the College needs an ROTC, both to fulfill its national responsibility to turn out military officers and to keep enrollment steady under present draft rules.

An intellectualized ROTC course, however, is not the best way to fill the educational gap left by ROTC. If ROTC students (or any others) want courses in the historical or policy background of any branch of the armed services, there are men and books enough to provide for them in the civilian arm of the University. Some professors hold military rank and a fistful of citations for just this kind of work.

Such courses could be a fruitful part of education as no ROTC course could be. For Pentagon control and the purpose of military training would restrict the freedom of teaching and learning that any liberal arts course requires. Even if Faculty men were used, there might be a repetition of the incident during the war, when a professor saw Navy sanction of his course fade away because he and the officers disagreed on how the course should be taught.

ROTC students can use more opportunity for liberal education in regular college courses. Monday's editorial will discuss how the present ROTC credit and course program can be changed to encourage this.