No Second Chance?

Harvard has a long-standing policy for dealing with students who leave the College because of academic difficulty --or, to use the less elegant term, flunk out.

The Administrative Board requires the student to leave Cambridge and sever connections with the Harvard community for at least two terms. During that time, he must hold a responsible job for a minimum of six months, and refrain from regular daytime attendance at another college. After the specified two terms have elapsed and the student presents the Board with his job record and a letter from his employer, his readmission to Harvard is virtually assured.

The Board reasons that most Harvard students whose grades are unsatisfactory suffer not from a lack of ability but simply from fatigue: too many classes, too many assignments, too much school. The undergraduate in academic trouble is usually sick of study, and the treatment for his malaise is an enforced sabbatical from college.

But circumstances have interfered with what once was a plausible and effective policy. A student who now obeys the Board's dictum and goes to work is very likely to be caught in the tight draft situation, lose his 2-S classification and be inducted into the military. Sometimes a few courses at night school will placate a local draft board without violating the conditions for readmission to Harvard. But when a local board demands full-time college attendance to qualify for 2-S, the student is caught in a dilemma: either he forsakes Harvard, or he is drafted.

The University has stubbornly refused to change its policy for readmission. Dean Monro acknowledges that former undergraduates who attended another college to avoid the draft have reapplied to Harvard, and have been rejected. Harvard's justification is that the Selective Service System is counting on colleges to maintain normal operations, and to make no academic exceptions for students because of higher draft calls. Admittedly, the University should not keep a student whose performance has been unsatisfactory simply to save him from the Army. But neither should it place an undergraduate who has fallen below normal academic levels and left Harvard in an impossible situation if he wants to return.

As long as draft quotas remain abnormally high, the Administrative Board should suspend or at least render flexible its requirement that students stay out of academic life during the two-term "cooling-off" period. The University has long prided itself on standing behind the students it admits and maintaining faith in their ability to study and learn. There is no reason to retain a policy that might deny an undergraduate the second chance to make it at Harvard.