Wallaceites Hit Conant Military Program

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Boston Globe recently had this headline on the first page: "Military Men Like Conant Program But Say It Would Cost Too Much."

President Conant in his recently published books, Education in a Divided World," has put forward the suggestion that every boy of 18 should be enrolled in a national militia for 10 years, and that summer camps be set up to train 10,000,000 youths every year.

It seems astonishing to us that the president of the country's leading university, devoted ostensibly to the propagation of knowledge, should suggest turning over the young men of our country to an institution which is the very antitheses of learning and free thought. One can hardly help concluding from the statement that his program that Conant would have us spend even more than the present 15 to 20 billion dollars yearly for militarization, and hence loss of nothing for government aid to education.

His position is more understandable when we remember that Mr. Conant is a supporter of the Draft recently enacted. It is a small step from supporting a measure which places a relatively few (for the time being) young men in the clutches of war bent military forces to the advocacy of a program that would give the military control ever 10 very formative years in the lives of every one of our young men.

There is little question that the money could be better spent in a program of federal aid to education, increased pay to teachers, raiding the educational standards of the South, a system of government scholarships to non-veterans and veterans, research in the non-military use of atomic energy and in a dozen other ways that would improve our living standards.

We maintain with Henry Wallace that the Draft is only one more step in the drive toward war in the part of the bankers and general who control our government's policy. We further assert that Mr. Conant's universal military training program lends them considerable encouragement from noted civilian sources to continue their war program. Harvard Committee for Wallace