Getting Faculty to Confront the Draft Depends on Discovering the Right Angle

When the Columbia College faculty assembled for a special meeting on Friday, January 13, most of them had never seen a copy of the resolution which they were soon to pass.

Within less than an hour, the faculty members had grappled decisively and almost painlessly with the issue that has stymied the Harvard Faculty for months--the university's relation to Selective Service. The college faculty resolved that Columbia should not release class ranks.

Perhaps Columbia's action and Harvard's inaction can be traced to some essential difference between the two schools. It is more likely, however, that the different outcomes are due to a combination of semantics, timing, and the choices--conscious and unconscious--of what should be made an issue and what shouldn't.

The proposal to withhold class ranks came to the Columbia College faculty almost by accident. David B. Truman, Dean of the College, had called the meeting to consider a proposal that instructors give only A's or not report grades to the registrar as a form of non-cooperation with the Selective Service. But the faculty quickly tabled that resolution, and began its brief debate on the no-rank plan, drawn up by assistant professors James P. Shenton and Carl Hovde.

It was passed overwhelmingly, even though almost all of the faculty members got their first look at the proposal when they picked up a mimeographed copy on their way into the meeting. Shenton and Hovde had circulated their proposal to about two dozen departmental representatives just a day or two before the meeting.

What had happened to the original all-A's proposal with which the faculty meeting began? Apparently, it was not intended to be a proposal. It was a memorandum circulated to departmental representatives, signed by Jeffrey Kaplow, assistant professor of history, and David Zipser, assistant professor of zoology. Shenton, by some coincidence, was the only departmental representative who did not receive a copy.

One day after the resolution was circulated, Kaplow indicated to another faculty member that he had not wanted the memorandum passed around over his name. But whoever circulated it, and for whatever reason, the all-A's proposal came to the attention of Dean Truman, who decided to call a special faculty meeting to discuss it.

Truman did not announce the purpose of the meeting to the press (i.e., the student newspaper, the Spectator) until Friday morning, but the word drifting through faculty conversations that week was that the meeting had been called to discuss the relation between grades and the Selective Service.

This generated quite a dilemma for those faculty members, like Shenton, who want to give grades, but who do not want to be made "involuntary, unpaid employees" of the Armed Forces draft boards. Shenton then decided to counter with an alternative plan. In the two days before the meeting, he discussed his problem with Hovde, and together they drew up their no-rank resolution.

At the faculty meeting, the first resolution offered was to "re-affirm grading." That this was immediately tabled does not mean that the Columbia faculty objects to the granting of grades. The faculty members simply felt no obligation to re-affirm something they had never challenged. Eager to move on to the terse but powerful request to the Administration to withhold class ranks, they quickly shelved the all-A's proposal as well.

The no-rank proposal carried about 70 per cent of the votes. Shenton points out that it actually fared better than that, since one faculty faction--dominated by mathematicians--abstained because they considered the proposal too weak. They wanted the faculty to denounce the war in Vietnam itself.

This kind of strong anti-war action was neatly avoided by the rank-in-class proposal. The Shenton-Hovde proposal was decidedly not an explicit attack on the war in Vietnam, and it did not, as did Harvard's faculty debates, directly confront 2-S. One can deduce from a comparison of the two debates that a university faculty can more easily justify taking a stand on rank-in-class than on 2-S or the war. Withholding rank-in-class seems within the rightful realm of faculty consideration because, as Shenton told the Spectator, it is an attempt to "restore the proper relationship between student and teacher."

But would the Columbia faculty have considered a denunciation of the Vietnam war, such as the mathematicians proposed, within their rightful domain? "Denunciation might have gotten through the faculty," Shenton suggested in a Crimson interview last week, "But it would have obscured the more immediate issue."

Hovde, on the other hand, thinks a condemnation of the war would have been "overwhelmingly defeated." This does not mean that a majority of the faculty favors Johnson's policy in Southeast Asia; only that a majority feels that the faculty should not take a stand, qua faculty, on such an issue.

It is not clear what Columbia would have done with a proposal, such as Harvard's to attack 2-S. A condemnation of 2-S seems to lie somewhere between what Columbia approved and what the mathematicians' faction wanted to approve. When Hovde was asked about a 2-S proposal, he hesitated and then said he was not sure what Columbia would have decided if that had turned out to be its issue.

While denunciation of government policy is cautiously avoided by college faculties, disillusion with government policy is the genetic issue. If it were not for the peculiar nature of the Vietnam war, Hovde suggested, Columbia would not have acted. "It did not come up in the Korean War," under a similar Selective Service setup, he said.

The whole thing seems to be reduceable to a neat pattern. Faculty members object to a frustrating war, and they are looking for an acceptable, and still powerful, form of protest. They turn, therefore, to rank-in-class--which they consider harmful to the academic experience. Rank-in-class is a legitimate educational weapon for a larger, intellectual attack.

By ignoring the rank-in-class issue and focusing on 2-S, the Harvard Faculty deviated from this pattern. It got bogged down in a jurisdictional dispute, and ended by rejecting a proposal that smacked too much of political protest and not enough of academic reform.

The faculty member's dilemma is his dual role as citizen and professor. During his interview, when Shenton inveighed against 2-S on the grounds that it is "lunatic" to exempt a man while educating him only to jeopardize him afterwards, he prefixed his remark with, "As a private individual, I think . . ."

The distinction between an academic matter like rank-in-class and a political matter like conduct of the Vietnam war does not make the Columbia manifesto any less a victory for anti-Vietnam war forces. And when a college of Columbia's stature joins the no-rank club, there is a good chance that it may initiate a snowball effect. The argument presented at Harvard, and elsewhere, that faculties should refrain from concerted action, is in no logical way weakened as more schools refuse to release ranks--just because everyone is doing it does not make it right. But the argument, logical to the end, might simply fade away