Minuteman U.

"Human history," wrote H. G. Wells, "becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." The race is vividly symbolized in 15 buried capsules, scattered below the prairies of western South Dakota and manned by pairs of launch control officers for Minuteman intercontinental missiles.

Dressed in white coveralls, blue neck bands and combat boots, each pistolpacking Air Force officer spends 24 continuous hours in "the hole" every four days, monitoring a control panel that can aim and fire ten Minutemen housed in underground silos various distances away. It is intermittent work that leaves some idle time, and the big majority of the men spend the spare hours as graduate students working toward an M.A. in business administration from Ohio State University, 1,200 miles away.

Heavy Pressures. No correspondence school, Minuteman U. has 132 officer-students and a faculty of Ohio State professors who volunteer to spend three to six months at the Ellsworth Air Force Base, working under Resident Director Robert E. Hastings, 35, an Ohio State assistant professor and former Air Force ground crew chief. No diploma mill, it offers the same courses and requires the same standards from servicemen as from the civilians back in Ohio. The chief difference is the academic schedule, which has to fit the students' erratic hours. The library at Minuteman U. is open day and night, all week. The students attend classes, between duty days, in two low white buildings overlooking snow-dusted fields dotted with horses and cows. Since the launch control officers are half-time students, they will take 3 1/2 to four years to get a degree.

As qualification, Ohio State demanded B.A.s acquired with B-minus or better averages from accredited schools, and the Air Force picked only men who passed muster. One professor finds the students "a shade above those I've had on the main campus." The dropout rate at Minuteman U. is 19% a year, compared with a 40% attrition rate among all Ohio State graduate students, even though the men must juggle the time for homework and classes with family demands and additional Air Force requirements such as technical training, military tests, and logging enough flying time to maintain their pilot status. The strain is heavy. "I really felt good when Dr. Hastings told me there was no such thing as a happy graduate student, that they are all plagued by pressures and indecision," says Captain Phil Hansen, an Indiana University business school graduate with twelve years in the Air Force.

Successful Model. Minuteman U. was proposed by the Strategic Air Command to help attract highly intelligent officers for missile control crews, and to enrich their long hours of tedious, isolated duty. Several universities turned down the idea, but Ohio State, which since 1955 has operated the School of Systems and Logistics at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, agreed to open a branch campus at Ellsworth under a $500,000 contract with the Air Force Institute of Technology. Now rounding out its first year of full-scale operation, the school has been "phenomenally successful," says Major James B. Woodruff, liaison man between Hastings and the Institute. Many older students (average age: 30) plan to become teachers when they leave the Air Force. Graduates who stay on will become much-needed managers, trained to allocate and spend defense dollars.

Based on the record of Minuteman U., the Air Force Institute signed the Universities of North Dakota, Missouri and Wyoming to open similar schools at other missile sites. Unluckily, the Institute's own school to give M.A.s in aerospace technology at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana has lately faltered because of a high dropout rate, leaving the Institute leary of the whole principle. But Ellsworth and the other Minuteman schools have three contracted years to run, and Hastings and Woodruff feel confident that by then there will be no doubting the value of underground education.

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