Education: Quonset College

On Saipan, as everywhere else that servicemen found themselves, there was big talk and high resolve about the cor respondence-school courses offered by the United States Armed Forces Institute (TIME, Feb. 21, 1944). Thousands signed up. Yet Lieut. Clinton C. Nichols, the Navy’s education officer on the island, was shocked by one fact: less than 7% stuck it out long enough to finish even one course.

Lieut. Nichols decided that what was needed was the personal teaching touch, and a campus. By last week Saipan Col lege had started its third class with an overcapacity enrollment of 1,100 stu dents.

Saipan’s sessions are held nightly in two Quonset huts. The students include a lieu tenant commander, the teachers an ordi nary seaman. (Among the faculty are a Ph.D. and several M.A.s, one of them a Negro corporal in the Marines.) Half of the students are working for high-school diplomas (it is up to the home-town school whether to credit G.I.

training), most of the rest for college credit. One man signed up for a course in crop management because the vegetable garden outside his barracks became in fested with worms. Two men who were lawyers before the war, unable to find a refresher law course, turned to teaching law to keep in practice. A class for illiter ates (20 have signed up) includes two sailors from a passing submarine. Their skipper ordered them to enroll when he discovered that all they could read aboard ship were the “No Smoking” signs. (Said one: “The other boys on the boat write home for us. We never know what they say.”) Saipan College’s library shelves and much of its furniture were built by de voted students in the Seabees. They are now planning to trade its red mud tract for a handsome campus with grass, palm trees, and banana groves.