Recent College Polls Compared

In an earlier poll called the "New England Referendum on Vietnam," coordinators Kim Marshall '68 and Peter Rousmaniere '69 found Harvard students to be overwhelmingly against the war. The poll administered in late November to the students, faculty and staff of New England colleges indicated that three out of four respondents described the war in Vietnam as a civil war and said that the U.S. commitment was not in the best interests of the South Vietnamese. The referendum also found that 83 per cent of the Harvard students polled did not approve of the manner in which President Johnson was handling the conflict in Vietnam.

Seniors More Radical

On a somewhat similar question, the CRIMSON poll found that 94 per cent of the seniors disapproved of LBJ's Vietnam stand. The ten per cent disparity can probably best be explained by considering the difference between the two samples. The Referendum, which covered a large age group and included women, asked questions of people who are not as vulnerable to the draft as seniors -- thus the result was slightly less radical.

The assumption behind much of this speculation is that those students who will have to face the draft in June have a vested interest in the war ending immediately. Marshall, on the other hand, found through cross tabulation that a person's draft eligibility in the next three years had "no impact on his opinions." Of course it is possible that seniors appear to be more radical on the war than the majority of Harvard students simply because they have been at Harvard longer than others and have had more time to be socialized by anti-war sentiment rampant on campus. Still, it doesn't sound unreasonable to suggest that vulnerability has something to do with one's political opinions. One particular phenomenon which seems to bear this out is that students have become markedly more radical since they learned that graduate school was not going to be an automatic deferment.

The fact that both the Referendum and the CRIMSON poll found a huge anti-war vote at Harvard tends to reenforce the credibility of each of the studies. Further coroboration comes in that both polls found approximately the same percentage of adamant draft resistors. While Marshall discovered that 29.8 per cent of the Harvard students polled endorsed sit-ins, draft card burning, and draft resistance as a legitimate form of anti-war protest, the CRIMSON poll found 22 per cent of the Harvard students would resist the draft by either leaving the country or going to jail if such an act were necessary in order to avoid induction.

Lonely Hawks

While Marshall's poll shows that 4.5 per cent advocate increased bombing and military activity, our poll indicates that only one per cent of the seniors would like to see the war stepped up. Similarly while the Referendum had only 14.5 per cent of the sample advocating immediate withdrawal, the CRIMSON poll found that 38 per cent wanted the troops home now.

One of the more interesting results of the CRIMSON survey is that it finds that students who come from public high schools do not differ significantly in their views about the draft and the war from prep school students. Equally surprising is that the poll finds little variation in the political opinions of students from different regions of the country. The only variable which seemed to make a difference was whether or not the student being polled came from a large city (over 500,000 inhabitants) or from a rural or suburban area. Those from the cities tended to be more radical.