BRINGING THE WAR HOME

The college and fraternity situation, already very uncertain, has been rendered infinitely more so by the action of the War department in organizing the student army training corps. By its contracts with its colleges the department practically takes over 400 colleges, and requires them to adjust their curricula and activities to the needs of the army. The situation is outlined in a statement by Ralph Barton Perry, authorized by the War department, and printed below.

While the facts themselves as therein stated indicate a radical change in college conditions, the implications are vastly more so. The primary object in all these colleges will be to serve the Government. Other students than those in the student army training corps will get whatever attention the colleges have means left them to furnish. Furthermore, these students in the corps will be under strict military discipline day and night. Normal college life will for them be out of the question, and what that means to the fraternities is uncertain, but not promising.

Since the universities must arrange for the housing and subsistence of these students, those institutions which have no dormitories available are preparing to take over-commandeer if necessary—all fraternity and club houses. These will be treated as barracks; all the furnishings will be removed, and replaced by fittings supplied by the War department. And houses will be filled to capacity with members of the corps. The president of the University of Minnesota has already announced that fraternities there will be out of business for the coming year. President James of the University of Illinois seems to think that the same will be true at that institution. Since these two are typical of most of the state universities the outlook is certainly a serious one.

The outline prepared by Mr. Perry follows.

By order of the Secretary of War, General Peyton C. March, chief of staff, has approved a plan for the organization of a

student army training corps in the educational institutions of the country to train men as officers and technical experts in the army. The plan for the student army training corps, as altered to conform to the plans of the War department for lowering the draft age, will utilize the plant, equipment and organization of the colleges to maintain a reservoir of officer material for training, from which it will be possible to meet the enlarged needs of the various branches of the service.

The length of time during which men will be trained in the colleges will depend upon the needs of the service. As fast as one group of trained men is drawn from the colleges into the service, their places will be taken by a new quota obtained by voluntary induction or through the draft. In this way the educational facilities of the country will be used to maintain a constant supply of men who are trained to meet the needs of the army.

Under the regulations provided for the student army training corps, selected young men who are physically fit for military service, who are eighteen years of age or over, and who have had a grammar school education, may voluntarily be inducted into the army and enter upon a course of special training. Those who have had a grammar school education, but no more, will ordinarily enter special training detachments to be trained along mechanical lines of military value. These detachments will become a part of the student army training corps, and young men who prove in the course of their mechanical training that they are officer material may be transferred to a unit in one of the colleges to be prepared to enter a central officers' training camp. Young men who have had at least a high school education will be allowed to enter the colleges for more advanced training as officers and technical experts of various kinds, according to their experience and abilities. Those men who show promise under this training will be kept in college until qualified to enter central officers' training camps or to go directly into the service as technical experts. Those who do not will be sent either to noncommissioned officers' schools or to the nearest depot brigade, or in case they show special technical or mechanical ability, to the detachments where men are trained for such work.

Arrangements will be made for transferring from the depot brigades to units of the student army training corps men whose ratings in the cantonments indicate them to be officer material, but not yet ready to enter central officers' training camps. Every effort will be made to give every young man who enters the service under this plan opportunity for the training best suited to his natural ability and preferences, in order to enable him to serve the country in the most efficient way.

A SLUMP IN FACULTIES

[These observations are made by a college teacher who is not affected by the conditions he discusses.]

The slump that has taken place in scholarship since the war began has been accounted for by the distractions of war excitement, the campaigns for various war objects, and the absence of many or most of the older and more serious students. These have all played their part, but much of the loss is due to quite another cause.

Our college faculties are deteriorating. There has been a little, but not much, truth in the statements made during the past ten years that the really able young men were going into business or the other professions and leaving only the weaklings to man the colleges; but the colleges have shown a purpose to make college positions attractive enough to hold the good men. With the coming of the war there has come a perilous change; all the gain has been lost, and more. Many of the best young faculty men have gone into government service; that loss is an inevitable cost of war. But many others are withdrawing because they wish to live decently and comfortably, and nearly any other work they enter will permit them to do so more readily than college teaching. In doing so they do not expose themselves to criticism for any lack of loyalty to their profession or to their college. Though a man may show his loyalty by standing by his college now, he may also show it by leaving, for many kinds of labor now have the flavor of that desirable quality. Most of these younger men have their careers before them, and have formed no strong bonds to tie them. The price to them of

being a college teacher, when it becomes too high they simply decline to pay, and go to some other occupation.

In nearly all occupations, wages and salaries have been advanced during the past two or three years to meet in part the rise in cost of living. The leaders among public school men have realized the situation. Professor George D. Strayer, president of the N. E. A., wrote recently that "The demand upon the schools for service was never before so great, but their efficiency is imperiled by the withdrawal of competent teachers, by the falling off in the enrollment in teacher-training institutions, by the tendency everywhere apparent to shorten courses and lower standards, and by the growing difficulty of securing adequate revenues The fundamental elements of a nation's strength are to be found in the intelligence and morale of its people. The present war is a war of engineers—a war in which the more intelligent and most steadfast will win. If the war is to continue for years the success of our cause will in no small measure depend upon the work which is even now being done in our public schools. These schools now constitute a most important part of the nation's second line defense. To permit these schools to deteriorate is to invite disaster.

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"We cannot hope to secure for service in our schoo's the choicest of our young men and our young women until we are willing to pay teachers a living wage and to make it possible for all to find in teaching a worthy life career *** If we want competent teachers we must pay for them. We know that in the present emergency teachers have gone into other types of service because the salaries paid enable them to live comfortably. We know, as well, that wherever the rewards are sufficient the type of service demanded is forthcoming."

United States Commissioner of Education P. P. Claxton is sending out appeals from Washington to former teachers to get back into harness for the duration of the war. The threatened lowering of the standards of efficiency in teaching and general education, built up through long years of effort, presents a serious outcome of war conditions, says Thomas M. Balliet, dean of the School of Pedagogy of New York University, in an article in the New York Times, in which the lack of teachers at the present

time is pointed out as a menace to the nation. Thousands of trained teachers are leaving their posts for war service and for enrollment in industries paying much higher salaries than they have received for educational work.

Mark Twain wrote that when God went to experiment by way of making man he first made monkeys, then school boards, and then real men. Even school boards have seen this situation, however, and in thousands of towns and cities wages of teachers have been increased considerably, in instances numerous enough to constitute a perceptible movement. And President Strayer has begun a national campaign which, he hopes, will raise the wages of teachers from fifty to a hundred percent.

Nothing of the kind is perceptible in the colleges. One of the first results of our entry into the war was to make the controlling boards in many institutions sweep their budgets as nearly clean as possible of proposed increases in salary. This policy was explained by the grave uncertainty of the whole situation. But much of the uncertainty has passed, the country has adjusted itself to new conditions; still the colleges are trying to maintain their old salary schedules, and in most cases are doing so. If increases in salary are granted, they are individual and infrequent, such as constantly result from ordinary competition. The colleges, especially the private ones, are hard hit, of course. But they will buy the usual amount of coal, no matter what the cost. A salary of twelve hundred dollars is worth now about as much as six hundred dollars five years ago, and since the colleges, in spite of the reduced number of students and the consequent economy practised in keeping smaller faculties, are trying to keep the salary level where it was five years ago, they are virtually reducing the true salary schedule. Therefore, of course, they are lowering the quality of their faculties. The better young members to an appalling extent are leaving, and their places are being filled by men and women who a few years ago would not have been considered for the positions.

Our teaching ought to be as good as our fighting. There is a long battle ahead after the present war is done, and in preparation for the uncertain problems to be faced the colleges ought to be giving their students the best instruction the world affords.