Education: Old & New Stuff

The tailor-made neo-Gothic campus of Washington University (St. Louis) has been buzzing for a month because authorities revoked the scholarships of one undergraduate and two graduate students for distributing circulars urging freshmen not to join the University’s voluntary Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit. In most schools benefiting by public land grants under the Morrill Act of 1862, R.O.T.C training for underclassmen is compulsory. Old stuff to most educators are the perennial kicks against it by boys who think either that fighting is wrong or drilling is a bore (TIME, April 6 et ante). New stuff, however, was the action Oregon’s adults took last week to end the particularly loud squawks against R.O.T.C. which students in two state colleges have been raising for years. On a proposal to make R.O.T.C. voluntary in the two schools. Oregon’s old folks resoundingly voted NO.