Militancy

As at the University of West Virginia, the College of the City of New York and many another U. S. school, (TIME, Nov. 28), students at the University of Wisconsin have been examining the value of military training as part of their curricula. They have decided that such training was not worth time stolen from their courses and seminars. They neglected to join the voluntary cadet corps of the university's Reserve Officers' Training Corps. The corps fell to pieces.

This situation the Chicago Tribune snatched at last week and brandished as a res horrenda, while it blared through the bass horn of its editorial columns: "It is a sign of mental infirmity that the pacifist opponents of the R. O. T. C. never try to relate their rhetoric to plausibility or probability, to conditions, facts or prospects or to anything resembling cause and effect. They have rancor and timidity, physical flinching, addled reasoning, suspicion, pompous illusions and gross fears, but never anything that can be laid alongside a fact or will stand a shot of common sense. Yet this unreason infests the professorial mind, and the men who are given their responsible positions to teach youth to meet life prepared to understand it, deal with it and make the best of it, send their pupils after moonbeams, chimera and the blood-sweating behemoth."

This ta-ra-boom vibrated over Illinois, over Indiana, over Ohio, and set quivering the editors of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a newspaper which once had individuality and still has prestige. Its editors threw off their eyeshades; reached for their fifes, ever ready among the lead pencils on their desks; and shrilled in tune with the Tribune: "This institution [University of Wisconsin], like many others, is said to be honeycombed with radical doctrinaires, internationalists and aliens. The boys have been led to believe that they should refuse to submit to military training and discipline. Why cannot all such academic proponents of essential sedition be sent out of the country? . . . What reliance, in case of national need, can be placed in these spiritless and spineless young men who scoff at military training under the influence of instructors whose teaching tends to leave the nation defenseless and at the mercy of aggressive foreign foes, or of the worse offices of internal Communists and other followers of the philosophy of the leaders of the Russian state?"

The fact which both newspapers ignored for the sake of their editorial arguments for military training and which both must have learned from their University of Wisconsin correspondents at Madison (each is rich enough to hire squads of reporters) is this: instructors at that university do not persuade their students against military training. They try to teach the men & women under them to examine life clearly, to be individuals. If students wish the undeniable benefits of physical training, regimentation and patriotism which service with the R. O. T. C. gives, no instructor tries to dissuade them. Instructors at the University of Wisconsin, as at all U. S. colleges where mass opinion does not quench their souls, are honest gentlemen, not perverters of youth.