The Flying Carls

In the "East Side" (female) dormitories of Minnesota's coeducational little Carleton College, delighted coeds caroled last week: "Anchors aweigh, gals-here comes the Navy!" Carleton's men students were excited. Their college had just realized a collegian's dream: a student flying corps in which they can win their military wings. It was the first such corps in a U.S. college.

Carleton's shaggy-browed, popular President Donald John Cowling had pulled a palpable coup. With collegians throughout the nation eager to get into the air corps, President Cowling had got the Army, Navy and Marines to collaborate in training fledgling flyers on his campus while they continue their college education. Some 300 of Carleton's 450 men students will be enlisted in the corps, known as CCOC (Carleton College Officers Corps). Most of them will enlist as reservists in the Navy. Carleton promptly christened the outfit "The Flying Carls."

Carleton is no Siwash. A Middle West Swarthmore, it is rated one of the best small colleges in the U.S. President Cowling in many ways resembles Swarthmore's former President Frank Aydelotte, a good friend of his. In his 32 years as Carleton's president. Cowling has increased its wealth tenfold (now nearly $8,000,000 in endowment and plant) and created an idyllic little college. In a region where State universities predominate, Carleton (cost: $850 a year) is considered a rich boys' & girls' college, but President Cowling tolerates no swank. His students are forbidden cars, have no fraternities or sororities, devote themselves to such simple amusements as blanket parties in the Arboretum (a campus park). Freshmen wear little green caps (boys) or green mittens (girls).

Carleton was the first college to establish a biography department, has an excel lent astronomy department (with an observatory on the campus) and a famed department of international relations, for which President Cowling wangled $500,000 from the late Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg. Of Carleton's brilliant faculty, five are former college presidents.

When war came, President Cowling surveyed his faculty for possible military use fulness, struck a surprisingly rich vein : e.g., Astronomer Edward A. Fath, who turned out to be one of the foremost U.S. experts in celestial navigation; Geographer Laurence McKinley Gould, a top-notch map man and navigator who was second in command of Admiral Byrd's first Ant arctic expedition; Physicist Charles A.

Culver, a radio expert who was an Army Signal Corps major in World War I; Botanist Harvey E. Stork, an aerial photographer in that war; Dean Lindsey Blayney, a colonel on General Pershing's staff.

President Cowling dispatched this record to Washington. Washington, impressed, agreed to let President Cowling's experts set up an officers' corps, to build an air field near Carleton's campus, to supervise instruction.

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