They were greeted by University President George P. By the end of the month, there were approximately 400 cadets on campus, and that number would swell to 727 by October. (Army Specialized Training Unit) was established at the University. McNair’s protests went nowhere, but as Drexel’s brief history with the ASTP experiment showed, his concerns were prophetic. On the eve of the ASTP’s introduction, the commander of the Army’s Ground Forces, General Lesley McNair, bemoaned that “with 300,000 men short. While there may have been a benefit in specialized training, their keenest need was for combat troops - and there was already a shortage of those. The Army, however, was never very committed to the idea of providing higher education to soldiers, regardless of their academic abilities, when it was fighting an unrelenting global war. The Army Specialized Training Program (“ASTP”), as it was known, would both breed brainy soldiers and save struggling institutions like Drexel, known in those days as the Drexel Institute of Technology. The government solved this dilemma with a plan to train the brightest soldiers at the nation’s colleges in subjects with military applications like engineering, medicine and foreign languages. Some college administrators worried they would have to temporarily close their doors, and government officials fretted that if the conflict was long-lasting, the military would find itself in need of soldiers with technical training that the Army could not provide. In the first year of the war, college enrollments nearly halved, dropping from 1 million to 600,000. The United States’ entry into World War II heralded a massive expansion of the Armed Forces and panic in the halls of higher education, which fell quiet as the nation marched to war. Courtesy Historical Society of Pennsylvania Cadets trained at the athletic fields at 46th and Haverford. The Army Specialized Training Program curriculum mandated several hours of physical education each week.
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