Early in May Columbia University inaugurated a series of emergency courses of a military, naval, and general nature arranged for the purpose of training students who desire to serve the national government in time of war. They were classified as intensive courses and were opened without restriction to all those who desired to be trained in any of the various subjects offered. These courses included military map making, field-service regulations, general telegraphy, radio telegraphy, camp sanitation, map reading and map interpretation, practical navigation, and electrical devices of the navy.
Harvard University has many achievements to her credit, for example: advanced training for selected officers under the leadership of six French officers; a cadet school for ensigns; a naval school for wireless operators; a course in orthopedic surgery; the furnishing of the medical personnel for four base hospital units; and war service by departments of dentistry, medicine, psychology, and foreign languages.
Iowa State College gave a six weeks' course in special military and military-engineering work. Regular two-year noncollegiate courses were offered electrical workers and stationary engineers, mechanical draftsmen and mechanics, structural draftsmen and building superintendents, surveyors and road makers.
At Cornell University all professors and instructors in the marine-engineering department and all the senior students of marine engineering were in either private or public shipyards on or before graduation day.
The University of Wisconsin, anticipating that a large number of persons who had been trained in the administration of stores would soon be needed in the civil section of the Quartermaster's Department, in the Ordnance Bureau of the War Department, and in the Quartermaster's Officers' Reserve Corps, decided to aid in training for these services by offering special courses in the classification and handling of stores for those departments.
This university also planned a summer session with courses in wireless telegraphy, first aid to the injured, Boy Scout movement in theory and practice, and gave a course of war lectures especially designed for teachers, and a course for Red Cross volunteers who wished to take part in civilian relief work. This last course was in coöperation with the Red Cross organization, which, as explained in another chapter, will have much to do with relieving families deprived of their natural heads. The men and women in this course studied the basis of family life, psychological and economic principles underlying bodily health, the resources of the state to preserve the family group, and methods of social service and friendly visiting.