ROTC is becoming, therefore, a recruiting agency similar to that of any large corporation. As such, many educators feel that it should no longer have its special status on the campus to aid its recruiting of college students. Even if ROTC programs lose this status, however, the result would not be an elitist officer corps, as opponents of "dis-crediting" ROTC often charge. Today's army requires highly educated college graduates. The military academies alone cannot provide them. The nation no longer needs special ROTC programs to "civilianize" the military, if only because many of today's career officers are technicians in uniform.

For these reasons, it is possible that many of the nation's colleges and universities will soon tend to change their relationships with the military by abolishing academic credit for ROTC courses and by generally withdrawing official university sanction from ROTC activities. Certain aspects of ROTC's position on the campuses are now specified by law (e.g., the full professorships for the militarily-appointed commanders of ROTC units), but these requirements could likely be lifted under pressure from the colleges. The armed forces need the skilled manpower provided by the colleges more than the colleges need ROTC money.

Of course, even though our educational institutions can curb ROTC, they will not necessarily do so. Many universities are more than satisfied with the present arrangements. More than 100 institutions continue to maintain compulsory ROTC in the freshman and sophomore years, despite actual discouragement from the Pentagon, which views compulsory programs as inefficient. The B.U. faculty's uneasiness about the relationship between the education and the military is evidently not shared by many American educators.

If the Reserve Officer Training Corps does succeed in retaining its special status within American higher education, it will be largely because the nation's most prestigious universities continue to support that special status. The ROTC units at most of the country's best liberal arts colleges are little more than tokens. Harvard's Army ROTC unit, for example, failed last year to produce even the minimum number of commissions normally required to remain in existence. The requirement, of course was waived, because the prestige derived from a long-established unit at Harvard is at least as valuable to the Army as the small number of short-term officers which that unit produces. The services, in short, are more sensitive to the significance of ROTC at such schools as Harvard and Yale than the schools themselves appear to be.

Today's ROTC is a complex and changing institution. It still uses the purposed for which it was founded 50 years ago to justify its status in American education, but the modern ROTC little resembles its ancestor of 1916. Thus, it is likely that American colleges will continue to re-examine their relationship with ROTC.

ROTC at Harvard

The Reserve Officers Training Corps is not very visible at Harvard. There were the cheerful letters from Aerospace Studies in the summer before your freshman year, and at registration there was a display with military things on a clean white table-cloth, with a tidy-looking officer standing nearby. Later, looking for your Math 21 section in Shannon Hall you might have wandered along one of the pale green corridors lined with recruiting posters and framed prints of bombers and medals. And trudging up to your room one fall afternoon, you happened to meet the guy across the hall on the way down, incredibly transformed into a uniformed soldier, and you were both a little embarrassed by the formality of your hello's.

But as America's land war in Asia enters its fourth year, what was once merely strange now becomes somehow menacing. To many anti-war students, the quiet presence of ROTC on the Harvard campus appears as a recent and insidious intrusion of the warmakers, an ill-conceived alliance between the University and the war in Vietnam. Thus even when the students in Mallinckrodt began to compose a list of demands one night in October, someone suggested that they include the abolition of ROTC at Harvard. But although the suggestion seemed in keeping with the theme of the sit-in, it was quickly voted down: there was a general feeling that ROTC wasn't going to be disposed of so easily, and anyway, no one knew much about it.

ROTC does in fact represent an alliance between the University and the warmakers, but the alliance is not a new one. Harvard has had some kind of undergraduate military instruction since the early nineteenth century, and its three ROTC units are today among the oldest in the nation. These units were conceived in the atmosphere of internationalism which for many years was Harvard's political character in an isolationist America. The original Army unit was formed largely in response to widespread student demand when, in late 1915, 1200 men of Harvard enlisted in a new drill unit within a few days of its creation. When ROTC programs were created by the Navy (1926) and the Air Force (1947), the University applied at once for the new units, and today Harvard is one of the few universities in the country to host all three ROTC units.

The largest of Harvard's three units is the Naval ROTC, with a current enrollment of 133 students. Four-year NROTC students must take three-and-one-half full courses from the Department of Naval Science to earn a commission with the Navy or the Marine Corps. Since all of these courses carry full credit, it is possible to earn more than twenty per cent of the credits required for a Harvard degree in NROTC--this is the highest percentage of any ROTC unit in the Boston area. Harvard's NROTC students, however, only count about one half of these courses toward graduation, and carry the remainder as fifth courses.

Seventy-seven of the Naval students are in the Regular NROTC program. These students were chosen for the program in their senior year of high school, and are expected, according to the Navy brochure, to be "reasonably disposed to making the Navy a career." While at Harvard, they receive Government scholarships covering all tuition, books, and room and board. The total value of these scholarships is presently around $230,000, and in an average year, about five borderline students are accepted to Harvard as a result of receiving this stipend. The non-Regular, or Contract NROTC students do not receive scholarships, but they do get the standard monthly allowance of $50 in their last two years, and also have the option of electing a two-year course, with a summer training cruise, in preference to the full four-year course.

The Army unit at Harvard also offers both the two-year and four-year programs, and at present has slightly over one hundred cadets enrolled. The four Army courses (all half-courses running throughout the year) are probably the least demanding of the ROTC offerings at Harvard, and about 90 per cent of them are carried as fifth courses. The unit uses the modified ROTC curriculum, which has reduced the proportion of purely military subjects by about one-third. Army ROTC cadets, however, can still earn thirteen per cent of the credits for their degrees in the Army courses, as compared to a national average of 10.5 per cent. Only seven Army cadets receive ROTC scholarships.

The Air Force unit offers only the two-year course, and has a current enrollment of thirty cadets. The program requires its students to take four half-courses in Aerospace Studies, which, like all ROTC courses, are taught by military personnel. Enrollment in the Air Force program is fairly competitive: last year there were seventy-five applications for about twenty places, and the year before the proportion accepted was even lower.

On the whole, ROTC students get about the same grades as their non-ROTC classmates: about 50 per cent of the Navy students, for example, are in Group III or higher. The ROTC courses can, of course, raise these students' academic standings. But non-ROTC students may also take these courses. The fact that ROTC courses are both undemanding and tuition-free makes them useful for making up a failed course, and most of some 75 non-ROTC students enrolled in such courses (mainly in Nav. Sci. 32, "Marine Navigation") have done so for that reason, according to F. X. Brady, formerly professor of Naval Science.

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