June 24, 2007
Okinawa University, 1946 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 PM EST I posted three days ago about the battle of Okinawa, which ended on June 21, 1945. By a fluke, the following day, cleaning out one office in the course of moving to another, I found a sheaf of papers from Okinawa. A friend’s father, an artilleryman, had fought there. Stuck on Okinawa for a while—there was a shortage of shipping—he’d helped found and become one of the instructors at the Okinawa University Instruction Center, which the forward to its typed-out curriculum (my copy is dated January 1946) describes as “an institution of learning for servicemen; an institution founded on democratic and civilian principles, as close to the American prewar pattern as possible.” Everyone at the university—it began with 800 students and what looks like a few score faculty—was in the armed forces, and almost all of them were very eager get out. A remarkable number of them decided to pass the time doing intellectual work rather than the more grimly practical and physical tasks they had been doing a few months before. The university’s head, a first lieutenant, was titled its commandant rather than its president, but otherwise the proudly asserted closeness to a prewar American university is often persuasive. The sheaf of typed paper lists a captain with an M.A. as dean of admissions, along with a registrar (a corporal with a B.S.), other administrators, and chairmen of fairly conventional academic departments (agriculture, business, economics, English, foreign languages, history and government, mathematics, something called mechanical-technical, music and art, natural sciences, and social sciences). The chairmen themselves, and their credentials, look a little odd by modern standards—for one thing, they are identified by military ranks rather than academic ranks, and no one had a doctorate. The chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages, Private First Class Faulkner, had a Baccalaureat de l’Ensignement Secondaire and a Certificat de License, both from France (there is no further information). The chairman of the Mathematics Department, a corporal, had a B.A. and an M.A., as did the chairman of the Economics Department; a couple of the others had masters of science degrees, and one an M.F.A. Some of the courses were offered for high school credit, others were at university level; some were practical—my friend’s father taught a course in reading blueprints (five hours of lectures a week, a minimum of another hour of academic work a day)—and others less so (Latin, an advanced course in harmony, etc.). The main texts for each course are listed, and they look pretty orthodox (a physiology course uses Gray’s Anatomy, Cunningham’s Textbook of Anatomy, by Jamison, and Applied Physiology, by Best and Taylor). I found this sheaf of paper oddly moving, and it also established some historical distance. In these documents the adults of my childhood, when almost everyone’s father had fought in the Second World War, look more like the most flattering depictions of them deployed in New Deal propaganda than like any later and allegedly more realistic portrayals. They look like citizen soldiers with a flair for improvisation, an explicit commitment to democracy, and a determination to better themselves. They must have had their share of the ordinary vices, and I suppose most of them had some traditional vices no longer strikingly conspicuous among academics—various unpleasant attitudes about race and gender—but to be blunt, I do not know if the faculty of any place I have taught, left to their own devices and unemployed, would be able to found and administer a university, despite having done little else in their lives other than attend or work at universities. I fear that in many cases my colleagues would decline to do their jobs on a purely volunteer and wholly unpaid basis. Nor, as it happens, am I am entirely confident that they could successfully invade Okinawa. John Maynard Keynes, at one time the bursar of a Cambridge college where I was several times a temporary member of High Table, argued against professionalizing the post he then held, asserting that it was “much easier to make a Bursar of a Fellow than a Fellow of a Bursar.” Maybe so, but on the strength of this evidence, I have the uneasy suspicion that it may also be easier to make a professor of an artilleryman, than it would be to nowadays work the reverse transformation.
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