The Year of the Draft

The draft has not interfered with the University much this Fall. Though the draft quota for October soared to a Korean-War level of over 45,000 and the quota for November will be near 40,000, almost no one in the College or graduate schools has been affected. A few students have been forced to curtail leaves of absence but "There has been no increase in pressure," says Dean Monro, "and if there had been, I think I wold have heard of it."

Monro says that although no figures are available, he is confident Harvard students scored well on the draft test and that this will probably protect them. According to draft officials, an undergraduate who is going to school full-time, making normal progress towards a degree and has not interrupted his education is almost sure to get a deferment provided he is in the upper half of his class or has done well on the test.

A graduate student is likely to be deferred if he goes to graduate school the year after he leaves college and if he is in the upper quarter of the male section of his graduating college class and scored an 80 on the exam. These conditions not withstanding, the 15-20 per cent of the students at the Law School who did not go there directly after college have not been bothered by the draft. At the Business School, where 60 per cent of the students "interrupted" their education (many, however, to fulfill their service obligation), there has also been virtually no trouble.

There is a striking difference between this state of affairs and the one which prevailed last November, when one of the brighter students in the Physics Department announced that he had been classified 1-A. The University went into a mild funk and then helped the unfortunate organize an appeal. It was successful, and he graduated summa. Time and time again during the late fall and early winter Harvard performed the same service, while in Washington the prime university lobby, the American Council of Education, implored the Selective Service to provide the nation's 4061 local draft boards with selection guidelines, and so end the student grab-bag.

The manpower shortage eased in January and February, as enlistments, which tend to rise in these months anyway, were further spurred by the memory of high quotas. Then came a long period in which the University first debated and then adopted Selective Service's plan to use scores on a mental aptitude test and class rankings as guidelines for deferment. Some students weren't happy with the decision -- SDS leafleted the draft exam and another group collected 1200 signatures on a petition protesting the use of class rank -- but Harvard officials cited an "institutional obligation," and complied with the government requests.

A remnant of last year's concern is the Harvard Undergraduate Council's plan to poll students on their attitude toward the draft. Even if the results of the poll reveal mass dissatisfaction with the use of grades, it is not clear what action the University will then take--for, as Monro points out, if a local draft board doesn't have information about a student, whether he is from Harvard or not, it will probably classify him 1-A. In that case, says Monro, a man could conceivably sue the University for the information.

On a different level, the draft is beginning to involve universities in a bit of social engineering that may change the way of life for future generations of students. Beginning in May with a conference of men from many parts of public life in New York City and then with Secretary of Defense McNamara's now-famous speech in Montreal, the country was made aware of a desire to change not only the specific form of the draft but also the concept of national service. The extent of public discontent was revealed in early July when a Gallup Poll was released showing only 43 per cent of the American people thought the current draft system "fair" -- the lowest percentage ever registered during a war period. At the same time pollsters found that parents favored, 4 to 1, a plan calling on all 18-year-old men to serve the country in some capacity -- possibly non-military -- for two years.

Proposals for the exact form of this service still vary wildly: President Eisenhower has suggested that all men be given 49 weeks of military training (one year minus three weeks vacation); there has been talk of sending people to the Peace Corps or to teach public school. No one, however, has suggested that we follow Ethiopia's example and demand that every candidate for a University degree spend two years serving the state -- though Western Michigan College is experimenting with a plan which will enable students to count two years in a Peace Corps-like organization as the equivalent of one year in college.

Many planners do agree that any large-scale training program will have to be conducted at least in part by private organizations, such as universities, churches, and service groups. Some Harvard officials have interpreted remarks by James Reston to this effect as a signal that Washington will look to the universities for help in establishing the program. So far no one at Harvard is working on the problem.

The problems confronting the proponents of non-military forms of service are staggering, especially when one considers that some 2 million men will reach 18 this year and there are only 14,000 persons in the Peace Corps. Even with the war in Vietnam, only 46 per cent of the men reaching age 26 have served in the armed forces. There is also the problem of the physically or mentally unfit. The Selective Service currently rejects some 60,000 men a year (between 40 and 50 per cent of the people examined), and, to complicate things, experiments conducted several years ago indicate that many "unfit" men simply don't want to be rehabilitated. (One project in which illiterates were drafted and then taught to read was unsuccessful.)

Whatever the drawbacks, President Johnson, who served from 1937 to 1939 as State Director of the National Youth Administration, is definitely interested. Early this month he told an audience in Ohio that he plans to call a convention of governors and mayors to investigate ways in which "young people" can serve at "every level of our society." Two months earlier he created a 20-man National Advisory Commission to study the draft system.

Chaired by Burke Marshall, a former Justice Department official, this panel will consider reforming specific aspects of the draft system and various alternatives to the draft itself. This is something of a first, since typical government surveys of the process, such as the one begun two years ago by the Defense Department, usually view things from military perspective. The Defense Department study, for example, suggested that 18- and 19-year olds be drafted before older men in order to minimize disruption in career plans; more important, it concluded that a completely volunteer army would be impossible unless the defense budget were increased by about 30 per cent. In contrast, the Marshall Commission is empowered to study the various forms of national service, the relation between the local draft boards and the system's national headquarters, and the whole business of deferments. There is even a private watch-dog group called the National Service Secretariat which will advise the Commission on the intricacies of the various proposals and presumably work to keep the idea of national service before the Commission.

The Commission's report is due January 1, 1967, months before the current Selective Service Act expires. Given the tone in Washington and in the people it is not unlikely that this report will mark the official beginning of a social upheaval with a clear-cut history and inscrutable consequences.