Drafting Harvard

It is next year. Now, it is the fall of next year. Snow turned to rain, to dirty tire-gray streams in the sidewalk ice. Then spring came slowly, stayed shortly. Commencement was not crisp and bright. The sky was thick and the ground was heavy. Then we lost them--the seniors--they disappeared in the witches' kettle of summer. We have not seen them since. And now it is the fall, and soggy leaves lie in the gutter like Corn Flakes left in the bowl too long.

We heard something about them--the seniors. The news came back slowly in scraps. Someone was shot dead through the neck. Someone was in Canada. Someone was just being arraigned for refusing to be inducted. Someone came back to Cambridge, on the run, to see us. He had been in Chicago last summer.

Everyone had been in Chicago last summer. They tried to surround the auditorium where the Democratic Convention was going on. They had little to lose. They were going to jail anyway, they said. One of the troops fired, and there was a riot. The black neighborhood exploded. That was Chicago. Everyone was in Chicago last summer. But now it is fall, and Chicago is gone.

We heard them all say it last year, how nobody was going to get them. Somehow they would get out of it. But they did not get out of it. And in the summer most of them disappeared, and all we see now are scraps boiling to the surface in the pot.

I.

THE name of the sport is Drafting Harvard. Everyone plays--faculty, administration, students, and the Selective Service System. The way it goes is this: the Selective Service tells the students that they can only go to college for four years. No more graduate school, unless you want to be something helpful, like a doctor, or a dentist, or a veterinarian, or an osteopath, or an optometrist, or a chiropodist, or a minister, or a research scientist. Or, you can be something else helpful, like a farmer, or an apprentice riveter, or a glass-blower, or the Vice President of the United States. The Selective Service makes the rules: how sick you can be, how crazy, how tall, how immoral, how ignorant, how conscientious.

Next, the students, who have to play the game, try to "get around" the rules, try to get out of serving by legal means. Why, you can run for the Massachusetts legislature and get elected--that would get you out. Or, you can get the girl you are living with pregnant. According to Selective Service System Regulations Section 1622.30 (a), that will get you a III-A exemption, provided you keep living with her.

Game Goes On

The game goes on. Why not let the Selective Service have what it wants? Ninety-four per cent of the class is opposed to the war, about half of them on grounds of conscience.

For them, Drafting Harvard should not be a game. They do not want to play at all. Many of them refuse. They resign, and the Selective Service gobbles them up or throws them into jail.

For the seniors who bothered, who were not real "Walter Mittys," in the words of one University President, the spring was a hectic scramble to get out of service legally. Many hired lawyers to give them advice and to defend them if they needed it. Others looked into bizzare possibilities: setting up an agricultural cooperative to gain II-C exemptions as farmers, applying to Divinity School, undergoing psychoanalysis. For many, the ploys worked. But the pressure was enormous. For many, the greater part of the Spring semester was spent trying to figure out ways to evade the draft, and failing.

Self-interest predominated. Two years ago, in the beginning of the controversy over the draft, Harvard students complained that the system was highly discriminatory, favoring the well-off. They called the II-S student deferment an unfair advantage for those who could go to college.

The costs of medical and psychiatric examinations and the costs of lawyers were beyond the reach of the lower classes. As a result, the poor, mainly ghetto Negroes would go first. The outcry here was sensitive and altruistic. Some students gave up their II-S deferments, but, mainly, people waited for the new draft law.

When it came, nothing was different, except the state of the war. It had intensified, grown more immoral, and more illegal. The altruism was forgotten. What was most important was saving your own skin--preventing yourself from being in a position where you would have to kill a man you thought you had no right to kill. It is too bad the altruism has been forgotten. The Selective Service System remains highly discriminatory even as the war grows worse.

Of the 16,632 draft board members, who make the ultimate decisions on who goes and who does not, only 1.3% are Negroes, 0.8% Puerto Ricans, 0.7% Orientals, and 0.1% American Indians. Conrad J. Lynn writes in his new book, How to Stay Out of the Army: "This discrepancy in representation may in part explain why in 1964, for example, 30.2% of qualified Afro-Americans were drafted but only 18.8% of qualified whites."

II.

But students are not the only members of the University community who are affected by the draft. The most interesting part of the story is the role of the Administration and the Faculty.

Before World War II the Harvard Administration viewed its relationship with students as custodial. In loco parentis was the rule. The University was the authoritarian father to the students. It protected them, but it demanded obedience. Until the war, the University felt that it could require students to act in certain ways and expect students to respond. Requirements were not strict, but the point of view of the custodian shaped policy.

After the war, as veterans of 25 to 30 years of age came onto the campus, the custodial role became gradually modified. Until recently, the University has tried to provide a wide framework for the exchange of all ideas and nearly all kinds of behavior. It builds a big playpen for all of us to roam around in.

THIS ROLE, squarely in the liberal tradition, has now come under fire because of the rapid expansion of the University community and because of the draft. First, the University has more outside contacts than never. Harvard is big business. The largest corporation in Massachusetts, it has assets of over one billion dollars. For example, the 1966-67 Financial Report states that the University owns 213,279 shares of American Tel. & Tel. at a market value of $12,156,903.

More important, as President Pusey noted in his Annual Report, new programs in the Kennedy School of Government, the Education, Divinity, Law, Public Health, and Medical Schools will mean closer cooperation between Harvard and federal and local governments.

War Policy Administrator

Second, the draft has put the University in the position where it is an active administrator of war policy. As much as Harvard tries to deny it, by inducing students to register for the draft and getting them II-S deferments and by processing and authorizing deferments it is actively supporting a Selective Service System that provides personnel for a war that 94 per cent of the class of 1968 believes is wrong.

Add to this the more dramatic issues of recruitment--providing University space for the Armed Forces and armaments makers to disseminate information urging students to participate in this war--and war research.

The draft also acts on the students to alter the old relationship. The draft is a threat to their personal and political beliefs, and a threat to their education. Two Harvard students recently were reclassified I-A and subject to induction after turning in their draft cards at an anti-war demonstration. The two talked to deans and faculty members, who patted them on the back but told them there was nothing the University could do about it all but Good Luck. The Dunster House Senior Common Room lent its sympathy in a weak-kneed petition, defying a rule against such pronouncements. But it meant little. Two Harvard students may well go to jail for their political and moral beliefs while the University, in true laissez-faire fashion, invites the Navv and Colgate Palmolive to recruit more "highly trained young men."

The relationship between the University and the students is reaching a crisis. The traditional liberal playpen is irrelevant. Harvard is, however reluctantly, supporting the war and the draft by its actions. It is neither politically nor morally neutral. It could not be if it wanted. Those days are over now. Meanwhile, educational policy is being disrupted (How can we justify ranking students for Selective Service but refuse to go along with the NCAA's guidelines on grading?), and worse, students are being snatched out of school for their beliefs.

III.

If the traditional liberal stance of the University is irrelevant, what do the students want their relationship with Harvard to be? There are two stances: First, they want a reversion to the custodial role but with a moral imperative behind it. That is, the University should, by its actions, take a stand against the war, and protect its students from the draft with its own power as an insitution.

The Divinity School, for example, seems headed this way. On December 15 its faculty unanimously passed a resolution supporting Divinity School draft resisters. It read in part: "We encourage members of our School community to join those who have pledged financial assistance to help defray the legal costs incurred by the resistance." The Faculty reportedly came close to pledging Divinity School money to this cause.

Second, students are asking the University to tear down all the playpen fences. School, they contend, should be reduced to a place where one takes his studies, and no more. The University should not restrict students at all. One evidence of this school of thought is the movement to abolish parietals. Another is the contention of some that the University should not protect them from outside police and should not place them in double jeopardy either.

These views on student-Administration relations are not held by two distinct factions battling for domination. Instead, they are held equally by nearly everyone concerned about the draft. The battle is within each student.

Dow Demonstration

The Dow demonstration can best be interpreted in terms of this inner conflict. Students were confronting the University, asking it to help them or to reject them: "We want you to help us, to protect us, to throw Dow out. But if you do not, we are willing to accept your rejection, your punishment," they were saying. But the University was again able to worm its way out of the problem with a traditional ploy: it neither accepted nor rejected.

The frustration is still there. Which side are you on is the question the activist asks of the University. You have to be on one or the other. Next time (and there will certainly be a next time) Harvard has closed its options off. It must either kick the students out, or by not doing so, assume the protective, moralistic position.

Faculty Decides

The ultimate decision, ironically, will be left to the Faculty--traditionally the group with the least power in Harvard's structure. What is most important for the Faculty and the Administration to realize is exactly what is going on here--how the students view the war and the draft, and what they think their relationship with the University should be. For many, understanding this is not such an easy matter. Leading academicians--President Pusey and George Kennan--showed an inexcusable ignorance in recent comments about campus radicals.

Pusey's whimsical description of anti-war activists is dangerously far off the mark:

Safe within the sanctuary of an ordered society, dreaming of glory--Walter Mittys of the left (or are they left?)--they play at being revolutionaries and fancy themselves rising to positions of command atop the debris as the structures of society come crashing down.

If Pusey means by calling an activist a Walter Mitty that the activist is only dreaming that he can change American society so that it will no longer be able to prosecute wars such as the one in Vietnam, then surely there is something rotten about society and about the President's concept of an individual's role in it.

Pusey went on to exclude from his epithets those "sincerely concerned about the war" and participate in "orderly demonstrations." He also disastrously underestimates the depth of support for the Dow demonstration. Six hundred bursar's cards were turned in, and 300 students participated. Is this the tiny minority Pusey characterizes it as being? Pusey does, however, recognize the extent to which the University is involved in the outside world: He notes students' "concern for the outside world and...desire to use knowledge for social as well as individual good." He would do well to recognize also the Selective Service System's new "concern" for students as soldiers.

Kennan may have set your mother clucking over her New York Times Magazine with his article of January 21, "Rebels Without a Program." He quotes Woodrow Wilson extensively on the virtues of the ivory tower in education. Then he writes:

There is a dreadful incongruity between this vision and the state of mind--and behavior--of the radical left on the American campus today. In place of a calm science, "recluse, ascetic, like a nun," not knowing or caring that the world passes "if the truth but come in answer to her prayer," we have people utterly absorbed in the affairs of this passing world.

Kennan is hopelessly disillusioned if he believes that the University today can function as it did in the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and his nuns. Universities have ties with business and government that are necessary for survival, as we have said. Students are "absorbed in the affairs of this passing world" because the world is making demands on them, with the draft, that are hard to reconcile with their consciences.

Along with this, students have, as Pusey notes, become more socially conscious. They use their knowledge and position to help people before they get out of the monastery. If Kennan thinks students should not involve themselves in the world, he is the real Walter Mitty. The fact is that they are forced to involve themselves.

IV.

Misunderstandings like these can be serious impediments to the resolution of the present crisis. Pusey writes: "Bringing students of this persuasion [i.e., activists] back to reality presents a new kind of challenge to education, to Faculty certainly, but especially and with painful immediacy, perhaps to deans." Pusey has the roles reversed. It is the role of the students to make the rest of the University understand what is going on for them. Administrators are trying to run Harvard in a way incompatible with the new demands of 1968. Students must make them realize this.

Without swinging too far either way--toward a totally new custodial relationship or toward a complete break in relations--there are intermediate positions that can be taken now to help solve the crisis. The most important would be to respect the authority of the new Student-Faculty Advisory Committee and enact any of its recommendations to bar recruiters.

Second, the University should encourage groups at all academic levels to take stands on the war and the draft: departments, common rooms, committees. Third, it should sanction the use of funds for anti-draft use if one of the Schools should advocate financial aid to resisters. Fourth, it should not discipline students for demonstrations unless they are "maliciously destructive."

Finally, the University should encourage more student-Faculty-Administration contact by ending secret Ad Board and Faculty meetings (unless they deal with personalities) and by setting up more joint committees. This is the most constructive direction--toward more University participation in the draft problem.

The second direction--toward a break in University-student relations--is less desirable. But this direction could provide an easier "out" for the University. Measures here would include lifting double jeopardy and extending student power and control to all areas of activity--ending parietals, establishing a more powerful student government with discretion over recruiting policies. These would be satisfactory intermediate measures. The long-range goal would be complete disassociation.

Meanwhile, while the crisis in the student-Administration relationship goes on unresolved, Harvard is being drafted. Even if administrators get the message, it may be too late. For many seniors it is already too late. It is already next year, and in the leaves and the scraps, Harvard is being drafted.

The University has to realize that it cannot be neutral even if it wants toJoseph Seamans