Critical Reading For Exams / Short Reading Comprehension 8

Ohio State was a land grant university and, therefore, two years of military drill was compulsory. We drilled with  old Springfield rifles and studied the tactics of the Civil War, even though the World War was going on at the time.  A. 11 o’clock each morning thousands of freshmen and sophomores used to deploy over the campus, moodily creep-  ing up on the chemistry building. It was good training for the kind of warfare that was waged at Shiloh, but it had no  connection with what was going on in Europe. Some people used to think there was German money behind it, but  they didn’t dare say so, or they would have been thrown in jail as German spies. It was a period of muddy thought  and marked, I believe, the decline of higher education in the Middle West.