ACADEMIC CREDIT:

With regard to academic credit, the services are all known to be most anxious to retain academic credit as a mark of prestige and a matter of ultimate inducement in attracting young men to the ROTC program. All services are known to be most eager to "up-grade" their curricular to satisfy the demands for "college-level" subjects. All services have some flexibility in this regard and are anxious to work with host institutions in search of agreeable compromise ground. The ability to do this varies among the services, however, largely because the Army is wedded--for better or for worse--to a two-year active duty obligation. Without being grossly imprudent personal managers, we cannot afford to take six months out of the two years--25 per cent of the ROTC graduates' productive time in service--to teach him the military skills which he must know in order to be an effective officer. With a three or four year active duty obligation to work with, our sister services can afford to teach their "officers" what is required to be an officer after they come on active duty.

Thus, short of a miraculous remedy that no one has been able to identify thus far, the Army must continue to teach some military skills while the officer candidate is still in college. Also, we are convinced from bountiful experience that we must conduct some kind of meaningful military training in the on-campus ROTC program in order to observe our students enough to make critical judgments about their leadership potential and aptitude for military service, hence their worthiness for a commission.

How the Army is ever going to disguise the purely military subject in its curricula (there are two curricula in existence now and a third under development) to nullify the severe academicians who demand social science type subjects for officer training, is a problem of impressive magnitude. Personally, I am convinced that the problem cannot be solved completely without vitiating the Army ROTC program as it is now conceived. At the same time, I am convinced that there is sufficient validity in the Army's current Modified Curriculum, when evaluated intoto, to meet the academician's demand for college-level subject matter and to justify, therefore the granting of reasonable academic credit. My views on this subject are set forth in greater detail in a position paper I prepared for the anti-ROTC factions on 4 October 1968.

In summary, I believe that the withdrawing of all academic credit for ROTC, despite the areas of vulnerability--a curriculum not totally controlled by the Harvard faculty and the presence of subjects that can only be defined as military (professional) skills--would not be an appropriate action for the Harvard faculty. I question whether the Harvard faculty would wish to engage in a witch hunt to identify and challenge all "weak courses" offered by the various departments of the university. Better, in my judgment, is an action by the faculty to cause a thorough reappraisal of the ROTC curricula, within the framework of flexibility available to each service, that would make the ROTC courses of acceptable quality.

Still unanswered is the question of the reaction to withdrawing academic credit on the part of the other side of the ROTC partnership. In my considered judgment, the withdrawal of academic credit for Army ROTC courses at Harvard would not, of itself cause the Department of the Army to withdraw the ROTC unit from Harvard. It might, in combination with chronic low officer production and other deviations be enough to bring this to pass.

The fact that two-thirds of the Army ROTC enrollment at Harvard consists of law (graduate) students and the fact that only 20 per cent of the undergraduate students actually use ROTC for degree credit make the question of academic credit essentially irrelevant. If this be the case, then it becomes the principal argument against any precipitous change in the amount of credit granted at this time. It must be noted that any diminution of the ROTC image at this time will represent only step one in the anti-ROTC radicals' ultimate goal of totally discrediting and destroying ROTC.

More important than any point thus far made is the role of Harvard University in setting a pattern of ROTC policy for the entire academic community. There are other colleges and Universities where academic credit for ROTC is much more meaningful than at Harvard. Many of these institutions are big-production schools which can have a major impact upon Army officer procurement objectives. Harvard has a special obligation to the nation as a precedent-setting leader of the academic community. "As Harvard goes, so goes the Army ROTC program" might produce a disaster of real proportions if the ROTC concept is weakened and degraded nationwide