Newton D. Baker to Woodrow Wilson

I have read and herewith return for your files the letter from Professor Fine. The particular part of it intended for my attention undoubtedly had to do with the establishment of a reserve officers' training corps at Princeton.
I have given this matter very earnest thought. Immediately upon the increased tension in our international relations, the colleges of the country generally desired the establishment of these training corps for their students. The demand for officers was thus very great and bade fair to be far more than we could supply. In addition to that, I found growing up a suspicion in the country that the intention was to officer our new forces with college boys and those who had not had college opportunities would be enlisted men. The War College Division, therefore, recommended that the reserve officers' training camps be established on Government reservations so as to make them as democratic as possible, disassociate them from the collegiate connection and take advantage of existing barracks and officers' quarters, thus diminishing the cantonment construction necessary for camps. I am sure this decision was wise.
Some suggestion has been made that a sort of junior training camp be established at one college in each Department to train men who are too young for admission to the present set of officers' training camps. Such junior camps would, I am sure, be open to all the objections which threatened the earlier suggestion and to this additional one, that only one such junior camp could be established in a Department and it would draft away the students from all the other colleges, thus disorganizing the student bodies of all our colleges and creating a sense of discrimination and prejudice in the minds of all the collegiate authorities whose institution had not been selected for its Department. I have, therefore, determined to allow existing collegiate reserve officers' training corps to continue only until the officers detailed to them are needed for the actual training of the new forces, at which time they will have to discontinue so far as official recognition is concerned.