SHOULD "PUBLIC RELATIONS" RECEIVE A PLACE IN 

 THE PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF FORESTERS? 



By HERBERT A. SMITH, 

 Assistant Forester, United States Forest Service. 



Throughout our program we have had before us the broad theme of what it 

 is that we are trying to do when we undertake to make a forester. That is- 

 what we are bound to come back to, whether we are talking about entrance- 

 requirements or the length of the course or the subjects to be studied or 

 specialization or meeting the demands of the industries or pleasing the men 

 themselves. 



The men themselves, as we have been told this morning, want a course that 

 will let them begin to earn as soon as possible; and the industries which are- 

 ready to give them employment want them trained along specialized lines ; and 

 therefore we must, apparently, crowd pretty well out of the course those studies- 

 which are intended to give all-round development rather than preparation for 

 specific classes of jobs. But, after all, must we? The spirit of youth is im- 

 patient, anxious to be done with preparing and to begin to do; and it is a 

 wholesome spirit for youth ; but it is not necessarily wholesome for youth that 

 it should altogether have its own way. Our professional schools have an ob- 

 ligation not merely to cater to the wishes of their clientele. If we are going 

 to gauge our work on the basis of what the industries want, and so meet the 

 desire of the bulk of forest-school students to get to the best-paying job with 

 a minimum of expenditure of time and money, are we not in much the position 

 of yellow journalism, which frankly undertakes to "give the public what it 

 wants " ? If we run our forest schools on this basis, we shall not prepare men. 

 for a career, for a lifetime of climbing the ladder; we shall prepare them for 

 immediate jobs. The school that does that successfully will probably prosper 

 greater, so far as numbers go; but the percentage of its graduates who even- 

 tually attain distinction will be unduly small. 



It is important that a man should, in laying out the plan of his life, look 

 far forward. He should prepare himself for middle age, for the period of 

 fully ripened powers, for the true harvest time of his activity. You can not 

 build high on thin foundations. The professional schools should recognize 

 that their task is to give men the right start. 



It is from this standpoint that I look at the question of preparing forestry 

 students for what we have recently come to call, in the Forest Service, " public 

 relations." The term designates for us, in the first place, a unit of organiza- 

 tion. This unit conducts a group of specialized activities, having a common 

 purpose. They are not merely activities conducted by specialists in the Wash- 

 ington and district offices; they are extended throughout the field organization 

 to an increasing degree and with increasing emphasis on their necessity. 



Take for example the forest supervisor. In the first years of the Forest 

 Service our supervisors usually had to face a local public sentiment which was. 

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