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Review- Articles 
Armed Services College Training Programs 

Wartime College Training Programs of the 
Armed Services. By Henry C. Herge and 
others, Washington, American Council on 
Education, 1948, 214p. $3.00. 
It is ~robably only a corollary of the pass-

age of time that the fire and enthusiasm for 
the wartime work of our colleges and uni-
verstttes, which in 1945 stimulated the 
formation of the Commission on Implications 
of Armed Services Educational Programs, 
should result in a report which is little more 
than a documentary history and a restatement 
of the implications made at random and with-
out research by prominent educators two 
years and more ago. The history is, of 
course, all to the good. It will be useful to 
have so coherent and connected a summary 
of the official documents from which the 
program necessarily sprang. Even through 
the hope that the occasion will never again 
occur, it is comforting to know that an out-
line and a blueprint are available without 
frantic research among dusty official docu-
ments. 

The first chapter, appropriately titled 
"How Higher Education Went to War," 
mentions the abortive experience in this field 
during World War I, and proceeds to give a 
detailed summary of the many meetings and 
conferences that preceded the activation of 
the firsf Army Training Unit on Mar. 29, 
1943. By the time the war ended, it was 
found that a total of six hundred and sixty-
three institutions had been cleared for use by 
the Army, the Navy, and the Air Corps, in 
relatively equal numbers for each. Chapters 
follow on the similariti~s and differences of 
Army and Navy programs; a detailed descrip-
tion of the Army Specialized Training Pro-
gram; the . training programs of the Army 
Air Corps and the Navy college training pro-
grams. All are replete with statistics, docu-
mentation and extensive quotation from 
official documents. 

Much of the first chapter is clear, forth-
right and understandable-even though 
somewhat dull. It .is when the reader wades 
through the ensuing chapters on outcomes 
and implications that he becomes confused 

.JANUARYJ 1949 

among quick generalizations, questions that 
imply their own answers, and statements 
that could have been-and were-made in 
1945 without benefit of the research which 
has gone into this volume. There is through-
out this whole section an urgent undertone 
of feeling that so large and important a war-
time college training program must, simply 
must, have some implications for peacetime 
education. Many of the implications so 
sought and so found can be found as well in 
the literature of higher education published 
years before the war. We did not, for 
example, need the wartime college training 
programs to tell us that students who possess 
exceptional and specialized talent will , in 
many cases, need to be subsidized if they are 
to go to school at alL We did not need this 
study to tell us that such a program and 
scholarships for the talented but needy will 
have to be financed by the Federal Govern-
ment, if at all; nor is the idea of federal 
aid to higher education a brainchild of our 
wartime college experience. 

A section entitled "Emergent Problems" 
presents a list of seven pertinent questions 
concerning government educational policy. 
The answers are neither given nor sug-
gested. It seems unfortunate that concrete 
reliable data could not have been marshaled 
to assist the proponent of a broad liberal 
educational policy in making the necessary 
political appeal that might spell success. 

Certain aspects of the wartime college 
training programs are singled out for special 
analysis and attention. One of these is ac-
celeration. Made necessary by the war, it is 
here advanced as being a good thing in itself. 
While it is true that many educational pro-
grams, particularly in professional fields, are 
so extended that they interfere with normal 
social and family living, the solution to the 
problem is not one of contracting the edu-
cational program, but rather one of making 
possible a more normal life during the years 
necessary for adequate preparation. All of 
the evidence presented in favor of accelera-
tion is gathered from limited experiments 
with small groups of exceptional people, 

89 



without benefit of control groups of more 
normal individuals who need time to think 
and to argue in order to properly assimilate 
the many and varied ideas presented to them 
in the course of a normal college program. 

A section is devoted to the integration of 
areas of knowledge. Two programs are 
described. One of them is a course on foun-
dations of national power given as a portion 
of the Navy V-12 program, first at Princeton 
University, and later at a number of other 
institutions. The course was undoubtedly 
an important one and certainly was needed by 
the future naval officers enrolled in the V -12 
program, but the implication that an inte-
grated course in international relations could 
not or would not have been developed under 
other than Navy auspices, is more than a 
little far-fetched. Collaboration among 
scholars in different disciplines in the teaching 
of integrated courses was already a fact to 
many progressive institutions long before the 
war. 

The other example of the integration of 
areas of knowledge is the so-called C course 
given to pre-meteorology students at seventeen 
different institutions. The course inc1uded 
work in mathematics, physics, history, geogra-
phy, and English. The course was developed 
in conference . by instructors from all of the 
institutions. Examinations were held inde-
pendently and objectively by exammmg 
boards not composed of the men who taught 
the courses. Thus a large number of stu-
dents in seventeen institutions were studying 
a common required curriculum and taking a 
common examination not prepared by their 
instructors. Such cooperation in teaching and 
examination was found in general to be satis-
factory but the observation is made in 
summary that (I) a common required cur-
riculum can be taught well by a number of 
faculty only if the faculty believe in it, and 
(2) a common standard examination always 
invites instructors to coach their pupils rather 

than to teach the subject. Whether or not 
these two disadvantages outweigh the bene-
fit to faculty, institutions, and armed services 
is not stated, nor is evidence presented to 
substantiate one viewpoint or the other. 

The volume ends with a chapter having the 
intriguing title "The Effects of Wartime 
Research upon Institutions of Higher Learn-
ing," but the chapter does not bring out the 
promise suggested in the title. It begins 
with an excellent historical statement, com-
plete with documentation, of the various 
research programs instigated and fostered by 
various government agencies during the war. 
This is interesting and important as a matter 
of record, but nothing of significance is said 
concerning the effect of wartime research on 
the institutions in which the research was 
conducted .• The investigation of this highly 
important and controversial subject was 
based on a fairly general questionnaire sent 
to twenty-nine institutions. The reporting 
here is in the form of fairly random com-
ments from those institutions, all of them 
personal and subjective in nature, presented 
without any attempt at organization. The 
result is a welter of confused personal and 
unidentified opinion. Tabulatioris of these 
random replies would probably result in an 
equal number of comments for and against 
wartime research, providing precisely no evi-
dence on its over-all effect upon institutions 
the country over. 

The book, I repeat, had to be written. 
Too much time, overtime, effort, and more 
effort was expended by thousands of teachers 
and administrators in the wartime job of 
educating young men to do special and im-
portant jobs in the armed services to allow 
these efforts to go unrecorded, and without 
some attempt at evaluation. The recording 
has been done. Th~ evaluation is still want-
ing.-LeRoy Charles Merritt, School of Li-
brarians hip, University of California, Berke-
ley. 

Bosworth of Oberlin 
The Biography of a Mind: Bosworth of 

Oberlin. By Ernest Pye. Chicago, Lake-
side Press, 1948. 2v. $8.oo. Order to Otis 
C. McKee, Oberlin, 0. 
This treatment of the career of a notable 

American religious thinker contains notes 

which merit attention from men and women 
concerned with the discovery and dissemina-
tion of knowledge. They follow from the 
effort, which was prominent with Edward 
Increase Bosworth, to invoke facts and to 
reckon with reality in the interpretation of 

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