3) The military provides an effective channel of upward mobility for poor people and minorities.

Whether or not the military on the whole provides an avenue of upward mobility, ROTC apparently does not.

Almost none of the 6500 military scholarships Congress authorizes each services to grant each year are awarded on the basis of need.

Major Bruce Peterson, director of personnel for the Pre-Commission Education division of the Air Force, said last month that "need does not enter at all" into the awarding of Air Force grants.

Allowances which all ROTC enrollees receive apply chiefly to ROTC-related expenses. In allowances not related to ROTC requirements, no non-scholarship ROTC cadet receives more than $50 a month during the school year.

In 1968, Army ROTC at Harvard comprised just over 100 members, including only seven scholarship holders. Ninety per cent of the army ROTC courses taken were not taken for credit despite their tuition-free status. Since most students were paying full Harvard tuition (two-thirds of the unit came from the law school and were thus already college-educated), ROTC's contribution to the number of poor students enrolled in Harvard could not have been substantial.

Furthermore, the military provides an unusual degree of upward mobility only in proportion to the lack of other safer, more profitable, more prestigious alternatives. White employers have always proved more predisposed to hire blacks to die in wars for them than to pay blacks equal salaries for steady civilian jobs.

4) Assuming that the nation must have an army, there is no better alternative than ROTC for the training of junior officers.

Any program which permits military personnel to study at colleges without the establishment of permanent on-campus military units under outside control, taught by faculty with other institutional allegiances, which possibly implicate universities in illegal, immoral, or politically repressive military acts would be a better alternative from the universities' point of view.

Any scholarship program which permitted prospective officers to concentrate fully on their academic studies as undergraduates on the promise of future national service would be a better alternative from the students' point of view.

Any training and recruiting program which responded more flexibly to the military's need for junior officers, which permitted future personnel to devote more time to rigorous academic study as undergraduates, and which did not cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars for small, decentralized, inefficient ROTC units spread over hundreds of campuses, should be a better alternative from the armed services' point of view.

5) A free and open University must enable all students to pursue the course of training of their choice.

No one can seriously argue that the range of appropriate subjects for college study is infinite. No popular interest in racketeering or bugging telephones could induce Harvard to initiate even extracurricular programs in these fields. Each proposed program may be accepted or rejected on its merits.

President Bok said last June that Harvard should be willing to "entertain a ROTC program on terms compatible with our usual institutional standards." Presumably, those standards are moral as well as academic in the narrow sense.

Radicals and some liberals have contended that aiding a politically repressive, imperialist military violates the ethical principles of a socially responsible, morally conscious university.