War Goes to College

War has jigsawed and jumbled the traditional picture of U.S. higher education. Colleges find it is upsetting their finances, bollixing their standards, putting new strains on their faculties, bringing them new types of students, converting them into vocational schools and making them, like industry, into virtual subsidiaries of the Federal Government.

But the Army is not taking over U.S. higher education bodily as it did in World War I when the Students Army Training Corps put students in uniform, gave them a private's pay of $30 a month, set them drilling on the campuses. The result then was a total victory of military over academic training and a lasting mistrust of Army control among U.S. educators. U.S. colleges now make contracts with the Army & Navy, bend their facilities in every way toward war, but are maintaining their independence and jealously hoarding their principles--if nothing else.

The drop in undergraduate enrollments has been neither uniform nor drastic--so far. During the college terms just ending, enrollment dropped 20% at California, 15.3% at Texas, 3% at Brown, Notre Dame, Colorado, Iowa State. A few technical schools like M.I.T. have actually had slight increases. Law schools have lost an average of 36% since 1940. "Many law schools may have to consider seriously during 1943 the alternatives of suspending operations or combining with other schools," warned Yale's Dean A. G. Gulliver recently.

Bankruptcy or Rescue? Since student fees are a large source of college income (75% at Minnesota's Carleton College, 50% at Duke and Amherst, under 25% at most State-supported institutions), dwindling enrollments burden all colleges.

Says President Clarence A. Dykstra of the State-supported University of Wisconsin: "If we lose half our students, I hope the people of the State will understand that they will have to pay more to keep the university. . . ." Wringing extra funds from suspicious legislatures will be no easy job for Dykstra and his fellow presidents of State institutions.

Small private colleges have not yet figured out how to escape" bankruptcy. "That's what makes our hair grey and our sleep light," says young President Carter Davidson of Knox College (600 students) at Galesburg, Ill. "I guess we'll all just have to enlist." The House Military Affairs Committee last week asked Paul McNutt to explain any plans the War Manpower Commission may have devised to use small colleges as training centers for industrial workers (TIME, Dec. 28).

To bolster college enrollments, the National Education Association has urged colleges to accept bright high-school seniors as freshmen--i.e., to lower their entrance requirements. Though this plan has been attacked (TIME, Dec. 14), the University of Illinois last week agreed to accept selected high-school seniors.

Professors Retooled. A 5% drop in the number of college teachers was reported last month by the U.S. Office of Education. This overall drop is less important than the grim shortage of teachers of mathematics, physics and other subjects which students shun in peacetime, flock to in wartime. Answer to this problem is the "retooling" of professors.

Northwestern University, for example, recently sifted its faculty for those who, with a little brushing up, could teach other subjects. Some 100 Northwestern professors were last week cramming for refresher courses. The retooled professors will teach not only Northwestern students but the 3,300 naval students quartered on the same campus.

Many college faculties were quietly drawn into the war long before their students. In 1940, when the National Defense Research Committee was established by Presidential order, the conversion of U.S. colleges' vast facilities for research in the physical sciences was begun. Many of the nation's most important war workers are professors who are on militarily secret assignments.

Manpower Mills. For the duration U.S. colleges are fast becoming vocational schools. Even women studying liberal arts are urged to prepare themselves for war jobs. Michigan is giving women a short course in petroleum geology. Regular four-year courses in engineering have been thrown open to women for the first time at many schools, but few girls are signing up. Girls prefer short engineering courses fitting them for secondary drafting-room and machine-shop jobs. Such courses are often subsidized by industries.

Greatest at turning colleges into manpower mills is the Engineering, Science & Management War Training program of the U.S. Office of Education. The ESMWT is spending $30,000,000 through some 200 colleges to give short, tuition-free, college-level courses in hundreds of subjects from toolmaking to metals-inspecting. These courses are supervised by college instructors, but classes are held as often in factories as on campuses.

Students in Uniform. Faster in many cases than regular students have left for war, U.S. campuses have filled up with men & women in uniform. The dormitory, dining and classroom facilities of many colleges have been taken over by the Army & Navy as a cheaper step than building new cantonments. Thus, when the University of Chicago last year lost 900 regular students, 5,000 sailors & soldiers took their places.

Biggest military invasion yet will begin in a few weeks--some 250,000 Army privates and Navy enlisted men will be given a regular freshman course to prepare them as officer candidates.

Permanent changes will doubtless come from this educational upheaval. Most likely, perhaps, is a tendency expressed last week by Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins: a new phase of college history, the phase of education by contract. Said he: "Institutions are supported to solve problems selected by the government and to train men and women selected by the government, in fields and by methods prescribed by the government, using a staff assembled in terms of requirements laid down by the government. . . .

"A government which has once discovered that universities can be used to solve immediate problems is likely to intensify the practice as its problems grow more serious."

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