dustcover information:

This volume is an account of the activities of American colleges in the Great War, including data and statistics regarding the number of college men who served, the percentage killed and the participation of college faculties in scientific and other specialist work. The volume also recounts the services of the women's colleges, gives a statement of the financial difficulties which the war brought to the colleges, and contains accounts of the S. A. T. C. as well as the American University in France and the proposed memorials.

 

PREFATORY NOTE

The lack of adequate interpretation of the part which the American colleges, both Northern and Southern, played in the Civil War has long seemed to me a public and an academic misfortune. The possibility of filling this lack lessens with each passing year. The share which the American college and university had in the World's War was at least as significant and impressive as that which the Civil War represents. Early, therefore, in the great struggle, I began to collect materials for its academic history. These materials include evidences furnished directly by hundreds of institutions, as well as the more typical sources of books, pamphlets, and newspapers. To each college officer, who has thus graciously and generously aided me, I am grateful.

This history, concerned with a small social and educational group, has yet largest relations. For it helps to prove that the higher education, in the person of its teachers and students of successive generations, trains men for the service of the nation. While higher education may in certain respects be justly charged with narrowness, it yet, be it affirmed; uses its narrowness for an increase of all human forces and for a worthy bettering of all that makes for the welfare of men. I trust that, from the reading of these pages, one may come, as I come from their writing, with a lordlier hope for the race and for the races.

C. F. T.

Western Reserve University,
Cleveland,
1st January, 1920.