GI Bill #1 and GI Bill #2: A Positive View

by Robert Oliphant - May 28, 2009
Columnist EducationNews.org 

Is our post 9/11 GI Bill going to work?  According to Robert Maynard Hutchins, back when GI Bill #1 was proposed as a way of pacifying 16 million veterans headed for civilian life,  such a measure would “turn the colleges of this nation into hobo jungles.”  Nor was he far wrong, if one remembers the thin-walled shacks of UCLA and Stanford. 

My own GI Bill experience began in June 1946 with a bunk bed in a reconditioned Washington and Jefferson College fraternity house echoing each night to the screams of service-connected nightmares. This was augmented on weekends by the thrashing and moaning of self-punishing pub warriors, some with steel plates in their head.  The Greatest Generation we may or may not have been, but we were certainly the drunkest.

Faculty tosspots. . . . Nor were the faculty reluctant to join us.  One of my friends spent two pre-semester weeks carousing at a local bar with a husky red-faced man who turned out to be the Dean of the College (he was a British poet-colonel who had been a prison camp commandant).  Several of my own professors traveled the same rapport-building route: weekend interactive barhopping followed by Monday quizzes jovially administered and ruthlessly graded.

This mammoth influx of veteran-students encouraged American colleges to continue grading on the curve, a practice which gave older men and women an edge, thanks to service-acquired powers of concentration honed by their experience with the “flunk 30%” grading policies of service tech schools.  This was especially true of those who came across to me (born in 1924) as Big Kids, that is, born before 1920 and mature enough for leadership roles as platoon leaders and field grade officers (there were plenty of former majors in my classes, along with a lieutenant colonel).

 Program design. . . . Apart from the “point system,” devised to determine when one got discharged, I can’t think of a more ingenious arrangement than the WWII GI Bill.  The basic monthly stipend of $75 a month was livable.  Along with a separate payment for full tuition (even at Harvard) and books, along with 12-unit course load requirement (as opposed to the conventional 15 units), GI Bill#1 encouraged students to go straight through and continue on to grad school as the American economy gradually staggered back to peacetime prosperity.  Certainly anyone who surfs the obituary pages today will agree that the WWII GIs prospered mightily and paid plenty of taxes.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the moral impact of the GI Bill continued to reverberate for a while.  For example, when I began my teaching career in 1959 at a newly established college, the college president, then in his fifties, was a former semi-pro pitcher who had come out of the navy as a captain (the equivalent of an army colonel).  Here, as I recall it, is what he told the faculty in one of their first full dress meetings.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re trying to build a first rate college here.  So if it comes to giving one of your students a B  or a C, give the C.”  What a guy!  To the best of my knowledge, we haven’t had a college or university president in this country since 1965 who would use that kind of language in a public or quasi-public forum, and more’s the pity, say I.         

An upbeat toast. . . . So here’s to the drunkest, greatest generation, especially the Big Kids who helped us to win the war, and  rebuild the economy.  Here’s also to the GI principle that equal opportunity must carry with it an equal opportunity to fail for both preppies and ghetto youngsters, along with its correlate that concentration trumps intelligence and even formal education seven days a week.     

Most of all, here’s to our new GI Bill as a long overdue democratic shot in the arm for American colleges and universities.  Let’s hope it kicks in fast.