Brandeis Students Urge University To Boycott New Deferment System

A plurality of Brandeis undergraduates voting in a referendum have asked the university to withhold student grade information from the Selective Service system.

Only 35 per cent of the student body has voted, but the preliminary results indicate overwhelming disapproval of present U.S. draft polices. Almost nineteenth of those who turned in polls Friday voted for one of four resolutions, attacking Selective Service policies.

Another 120--about 14 per cent of those voting--signed a fifth resolution calling for "support of the government in fulfillment of its commitments."

The most popular resolution stated "No person whether in college or out, should be forced to interrupt his normal life to risk death in the Vietnam War. We call on the faculty to withhold grades from the Brandeis administration until that administration pledges to withhold from the Selective Service system any information about the academic performance of any student."

The voting, which will continue until Friday, is part of a debate on the draft that has been raging on the Brandeis campus for the last three weeks. Undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty have all held meetings to determine the position Brandeis should take in response to the Selective Service decision to base deferment decisions on a student's rank in class.

Life and Death Powers

Professor John Seeley, chairman of the Brandeis Sociology Department, touched off the controversy in February with a memo questioning ethics of grading "In a situation where professors hold life-and-death probability powers over their students. We are now an intimate part of the selection system. We are perhaps as proximate as whoever in Nazi Germany 'objectively' determined the fraction of a man's ancestry that was Jewish."

Brandeis students have expanded Seeley's questions and are now attacking the ethics of the entire draft procedure. The second most popular of Friday's resolutions made no specific policy suggestions but opposed universal military conscription "because it legitimatizes the use of individuals by governments as weapons of war, even against the will of the individual. This is an affront to human dignity, freedom, and life."

Another resolution "deplored the use of any type of student deferment" and asked that the draft be conducted on the basis of a lottery.

The ten man student committee that organized the vote is uncertain how the results will be used. One committeeman felt that the student involvement was the goal as much as a clear statement of student opinion. "We'll feel the program is a success if we get groups working to pass their resolution and get kids thinking."

Chairman Harris Gleckman '68 has plans, "not too well-defined yet," for a Greater Boston meeting on the draft in the third week of April.