Proof of the Pudding

When Congress finally passed its new draft law last spring, it made a good many people unhappy and uneasy. The last couple of months have proven the unhappy and uneasy prophets more correct than even they had a right to fear.

What particularly concerns us is the way the law affects students. From the start of debate a year ago, prominent educators had joined Defense Department officials in urging that the law deal fairly with men still in school, especially with college and pre-college students. They pointed out, for example, that the best ends of democracy would be served if students were treated as citizens first, secondly as men who happened to be able to obtain some sort of higher education. Obviously, while a new measure was first going into operation, it might be impossible to work this deal into practice: but a law with some long-range goal in view should at least make the ideal possible.

The weakness and foolishness of the present law is now not a matter for conjecture, but a proven fact.

By delegating its authority to local boards in the case of students, Congress brought the situation of this September into existence. Colleges are discovering that, while most of their students are returning, some disappeared into training camps over the summer. The Law School, for example, watched while two hundred of its accepted applicants--men who fulfilled the requirement of being enrolled in an accredited graduate school--slipped one by one off its lists and had to be replaced. Presumably, the men who replaced the unlucky two hundred had no more qualifications than their less fortunate brethren. But they had "lenient" local boards.

Another case in point: Selective Service officials, after a good deal of conferring with one another and with educators, directed local boards to view law students as undergraduates since both groups were seeking a bachelor's degree, albeit in different subjects. Other graduates of accredited schools going to other advanced professional schools, like business, or medicine, are still qualified graduate students since they happen to be after degrees termed "master" or "doctor."

President Conant told the University's June Commencement audience that the nation would soon have to take another look at its draft law. He was absolutely correct. Congress might well take its lead from a scientist, trained in the empirical method of arriving at a conclusion. The test of practice has come up with that answer so many times now that even the densest experimenter should be able to agree with the simple and accurate hypothesis that this is a poor law.