Word: coercion
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...agree the blood drive is a praiseworthy cause, and that the ROTC should cooperate in it. But there is, in any enterprise, a place where cooperation ends and bribery and velled coercion begin. As Mr. Balding says, ROTC students do not need bribery to donate blood. But offering extra merits for giving blood IS bribery, and informing students they will be marched to the donating station in a unit IS the coercion of conformity. Perhaps, as Mr. Balding contends, this is not "unusual pressure." But it is pressure nevertheless, and a kind of pressure neither the ROTC nor any other...
...reducing a matter of personal choice to one of crude force. Blood drives, granted, are directed toward goals so manifestly desirable that they justify what otherwise would, at a liberal arts college, be odious in the extreme--but even here, there must be a limit. Bribery and thinly-veiled coercion are will beyond that limit...
...with a fact-packed salvo against each charge. "We give the subscriber a morning, evening and Sunday edition for one price [40? a week],", said Roberts. "That service was started . . . by [the] founder of the Star [and] has never been challenged until now." Roberts argued that there is no coercion on advertisers and that the paper's ad rate for all editions, even if applied to only one edition, "would still be lower than the average advertising rate of the major newspapers in the country...
...when Widener was built, the library has charged late-comers five cents. Even in the non-inflation days of 1915 book fines did not provide revenue; fines were for one simple purpose, to force a student to bring books back, when they were due. Now 38 years later, the coercion philosophy of the fine still exists, theoretically anyway. But today a nickle means little, and the element of force is gone. Nowadays it is about ten times easier for a student to overlook a due date for ten days; the charge would only be 50 cents...
Harvard's ROTC commanders have managed their exasperating task very well on the whole, but in this case, we fear, one of them is on the wrong side of that vague but crucial line. If the AROTC could not mold officers without dances, then we could hardly object to coercion. This is not the case, though. Dances and other social functions are hardly essential to teach men discipline, to teach them military procedures, techniques, and the other qualities good officers possess. Social functions are just not important enough to justify the inroads they make on an undergraduate's normal interests...