A Modest Proposal

It is now impossible for all but the lame or diseased to drop out of Harvard without being drafted. The "year-off"--for the student who is fired as well as the voluntary leaver--is dead and will remain so until the Selective Service Act is revised or the Vietnam war ends.

Before the war about 25 per cent of those who entered Harvard dropped out, half voluntarily. About 90 per cent of each freshman class eventually graduated. There are still students who need and want to get away, and some still have to be asked to leave. For most, however, life as an enlisted man seems dull, full of the regimentation and requirements they seek to escape. And two or three years seems a long time to be away from college.

Harvard could provide an alternative by building the leave of absence into the college curriculum. It could establish a program of independent study away from campus, which might be called the "academic semester off."

In a semester away from college a student would miss two full courses. He might be required to take one full course in summer school before or after his time away. This seven-week course would still leave five months for the "academic semester off." which would also count as a full course.

The student's project would be sponsored by a Faculty member, but would not be limited to any specific topic or field. There are many possible activities which, in slightly different form, are already given credit by Harvard: anthropological field work, research in a scientific lab, writing fiction, or making movies, for example.

But, as those in the Administration who encouraged "years-off" in the past recognized, projects which are not yet "academically respectable" at Harvard are very often educational. Credit might be given for:

*Living in the Boston slums, working in a settlement house, and perhaps commuting back to Harvard for discussions.

*Doing civil rights work or helping with a literacy project.

*Working on an Indian reservation or with migrant workers.

*Going on Project Tanganyika.

*Working for a newspaper or for a government agency.

*Learning a language by living somewhere abroad.

These might be made more "respectable" by requiring the student to write a long paper about his semester. Certainly proficiency in a foreign language would be adequate evidence of academic accomplishment.

Obviously such a program need not be limited to those who would have been drop-outs in previous years. It might allow the student who had already picked his vocation--the photographer or journalist, for example--to test out his choice over a period longer than a summer. It would let the socially committed student spend time working in the South or in the slums, acting on his beliefs. And it would provide an extended period of research for the scholarly student.

Few flunk out of Harvard because they are intellectually incapable of doing the work; unsatisfactory grades are almost always due to neglect of and indifference to courses. Students who leave with satisfactory grades have often said they felt divorced from "the real world," that their life at college fulfilled no necessary or useful purpose.

Many in both groups have returned from abroad, the South, or a job in Washington with new or redefined academic interests which made college relevant.

Establishing a program of "academic semesters off" would circumvent the draft. It would let students with unsatisfactory records avoid immediate service and let others try jobs and projects which would otherwise be closed to them until after they had fulfilled their obligation. But it would not relieve any student of that obligation. Rather he would be offered the choice of staying on campus or getting out for a while, of serving in the military during or after college.

The restriction of the draft makes the assembly-line education which more and more Harvard students are falling into even less avoidable. They study straight through from high school to graduate degree without a pause for experimentation and exploration. An "academic semester off" would at least let some students stop and have a look around in the midst of that head-long rush.