AN ALL-COLLEGE CAMP

Tentative plans for military training camps this summer are on foot in various colleges in which units of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps have been established by the Government. As yet, nothing definite has been announced by any university in regard to this work, but it is certain that 1918 Barres and Tobyhannas are at least receiving serious consideration.

Would it not be more to the point this year for certain universities to unite their summer training into a single, All-College R. O. T. C.? Such an arrangement would abolish many of the objections to small camps, which are expensive even for the larger universities and impossible in the smaller colleges. In addition, it would have tremendous advantages in the following ways:

First, the cost of one camp for five thousand men would be, approximately, not more than two-thirds that of five for a thousand each. Any saving in this way is, of course, to be encouraged.

Second, those college corps which have not a sufficient enlistment to warrant a camp would receive the advantages for their men at a cost proportional to the quota.

Third, a camp which combined the artillery training of Yale, the infantry of Princeton and Harvard, the engineering of Technology, and the other advantages of a dozen more institutions, would make it possible for a man to be trained in that branch of the service in which he intended to serve later.

Fourth, a general staff composed of the military heads of many colleges would be more efficient, capable and authoritative than that of any one alone.

Fifth, imagine the value of executing maneuvers with all branches of the service present, instead of being merely "simulated" by flags and mysterious crosses on maps!

But the most important argument in favor of an All-College Camp such as we propose would be the possibilities of its relations with the Government. Hitherto, the War Department, although acknowledging the good for the cause done by individual units of the R. O. T. C., has never been able to support the best of the corps as they deserved because of the impossibility of distinguishing between institutions. If we pooled our interests which are the same to start with, namely, to increase the efficiency of future officers and men and at the same time pooled our equipment, experience, and instructors, the result would be a training camp which the Government could back without fear of partiality, and which, we are inclined to believe, it would back much more earnestly with men and money than has been the case with the smaller camps.

The value of summer training of some sort can not be doubted; it is proved by the graduates of college corps now in the service. Exactly as the Plattsburg camps of 1915 and 1916 laid the foundation of the training of an enormous number of men and officers now in the service, so must the colleges today supply trained men to step in when the others are thinned out. We must, however, work as far as possible together, and not allow university ties to affect the training of the college man. The above plan has disadvantages which, upon investigation, may prove prohibitive, but it is offered as a suggestion with the belief that if adopted it would greatly increase the efficiency of R. O. T. C. summer training.