With the end of the war every effort was made to bring the University back to normal conditions as soon as possible. The speedy demobilization of the S.A.T.C. made advisable the abandonment of the plan of a year of four quarters and the semester system was restored by February. The members of the Faculty gradually returned during the year, and by the fall of 1919 everything was as usual, save for the extraordinary enrolment, which totaled 8,057 students on the Campus during the year, with a grand total of 9,401 in all, including the Summer Session. This increase was largely due to the men returning from service to finish their abandoned work, or to take up a belated University course. Eighty men who had been wounded were sent by the Government Rehabilitation Division.
Such an unprecedented number of students, which was larger by 1,500 than ever before, naturally brought with it many difficult problems, particularly in living accommodations. These difficulties were aggravated by the sharp rise in room rent and board, which brought hardship in many cases and was only adjusted by the prompt action of the Rooming Bureau of the Michigan Union, which made a complete survey of the city and brought pressure to bear in cases of outrageous profiteering. Equally difficult proved the question of teachers and class rooms in the University. This was only solved after many new instructors were engaged, a difficult matter at so late a period in the year, and the creation of many emergency class rooms. Special credits were also given the men returning from service, in some cases as high as fifteen hours, equaling a semester's work, in recognition of their special war-time experience and training and the new earnestness and appreciation of what a university education meant, with which they returned to their class rooms and laboratories.
University life speedily returned to its accustomed channels; only the service buttons, the modest ribbons in lapels, and khaki and blue overcoats remained to suggest the Campus of a year before. So great was the reaction from things military that the re-establishment of the R.O.T.C. in modified form came slowly. Eventually about 180 men, largely from the freshmen and sophomore classes, were enrolled in the artillery and signal service units under the two officers detailed to the University, Captain Robert Arthur and Captain John P. Lucas, who held the temporary rank of Lieutenant-Colonels in France. These courses promise much for the future, however, though during the University year the work is confined to technical training, with the drill to come in the annual summer camps which every man enrolled must attend. Not only will men be continually in training as reserve officers, effective at once in an emergency, but also they will form a nucleus around which a really effective training corps for the general student body can be built at any time when the necessity arises. If this work develops as it should, and comes to form an integral part of university life, we shall have profited by one of the lessons of the Great War, and with similar courses installed in all our great educational centers, America will be ready, as she was not in 1917.