UNDERGRADUATES, TOO PRECARIOUSLY CIVILIAN, DRILL, PREPARE TO ENTER INTO ARMED SERVICES

"Where do those Harvard guys get off, going around in civilian clothes and studying Greek drama while there's a war being fought?" In the midst of 4000 servicemen is a liberal arts college continuing its program unbothered, with a student body sublimely partitioned from reality? Well, no.

Harvard College once had 37000 students; now it has about 2000. They entered, in the old days, with four years of study and gaiety ahead of them; now few expect to pass their Freshman year. And if the method of entrance into Father's bond business was ever the most serious problem of the future, it's been replaced. Right now, the problem every Crimson wearer is thinking of and bulling about is where he'll be in a few months, what branch of the service he'll be in, and "when do I go."

The Army ROTC is a Field Artillery unit, headed by Colonel William S. Wood and under the same command as the QM ROTC. About 250 men are organized into two battalions which drill once a week each on Soldiers Field. Obstacle course, infantry drill, communications, and above all training with four new 105 mm. howitzers sharpen the abilities of these future artillerymen, for live ammunition.

Naval Science puts its members through a four year course, ordinarily, with a commission at the end. Designed to produce deck officers, the course emphasizes seamanship, navigation, gunnery, and communications. Students enroll for a four year stretch, and the present crop will all finish their college courses and must got degrees before they can be commissioned, although acceleration will made this far lees than a four year term for many.

Aside from these two actively-drilling groups. the Harvard undergraduates have largely joined reserves which will land them in specified places in the Army, Navy, or Marines. The Enlisted Reserve Corps. which emptied American colleges last month, took about 200 men from Harvard, and they are now sifting through to replacement centers in different branches.

A large number of men are enrolled in the Navy's V-1 program, which will motivate them in July and send them to college, probably Harvard, for Navy-sponsored education. IN uniform and under Navy control, they will nevertheless be allowed to choose pretty much their own curriculum, and will end up on native service. A similar plan to expected for members of the Marine Corps reserve.

The Air Corps Reserve had a large chunk of the undergraduate population; most of them have been called and are in basic training by now. A final contingent will be gone by the months's end.

Unattached multitudes of just plain draft registrants are rapidly dwindling with the 18-year change clearing out all but the most juvenile and scientific slowly but surely. Men in certain science fields are scheduled for deferment, but that's subject to change. Pre-meds, most of whom are in the ERC (deferred from active duty for a while) or V-1, have hopes of getting to med school under service orders.

And still the academic requirements pile onward. For a lot of undergraduates it's been a tough job to concentrate on medieval dates and wait for the sound of orders in a mailbox, all at the same time