Squeeze on ROTC

In the pacifist '305, students called it "rot corps." But the Reserve Officers Training Corps on college campuses was the first training of a lot of the young officers of World War II. Now state university students are beefing again about ROTC and the U.S. Army's archaic training methods. University officials have an other objection: cost. The Government supplies the instructors and equipment, but the burden of administration and providing building space falls on the universities. This year four major universities--Cornell, Puerto Rico, Rutgers, Wisconsin--have dropped compulsory ROTC.* Others are thinking of doing so.

The new trend holds no terrors for the Navy and Air Force, which have relatively small officer requirements and prefer to fill them through voluntary programs. But it has ominous overtones for the Army, which counts on ROTC for 13,200 second lieutenants next year--about 90% of its new officers. If the switch from compulsory to volunteer ROTC becomes general, the Army will be lucky in the future to get 50% of the ROTC officers it needs. At Wisconsin's Madison campus, the shift to a voluntary program has cut freshman enrollment in Army ROTC by 66%. Best Army hope of persuading state universities to keep the boys in uniform: a proposal, currently under study in the Defense Department, to give universities a grant of several hundred dollars a year per ROTC student.

* The Morrill Act, passed in the Civil War year of 1862, established land-grant colleges requiring them to "offer" a "substantial" course in military tactics. Whether ROTC is made compulsory or not is up to each school. But in Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Washington and West Virginia, state laws require it.

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