The Faculty and the Draft

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences will meet today to evaluate the 2-S student deferment. Sixteen professors will offer a resolution which, if passed, would declare the deferment an "unjust" system. The faculty must then decide whether it should submit its conclusions to the President's Commission now reviewing the Selective Service System.

The faculty can easily unmask the student deferment as discriminatory, since it basically protects only those fortunate or rich enough to stay in college and graduate school until they are no longer draftable.

Presently the 2-S deferment offers the student alternative ways of protecting himself against the draft. To qualify for deferment in the first place, he must be a "full-time student in good academic standing with his school." If "a full-time students" scores above 70 on the draft exam he will be safe as an undergraduate, while he must score above 80 to continue through graduate school. The other route lets a student stay in college if he can maintain an average which places him in a certain upper fraction of the class.

If a student must prove at all times that he is a full-time student in order to stay out of the Army, there is no latitude for the "year off" or "year abroad" which is often recommended by educators. Thus eliminating the leave of absence represents the first in a series of impositions which the Selective Service has introduced in the colleges.

To place a student's deferment in peril because of a below-par performance on the Selective Service qualification exam handicaps students who cannot afford the best schooling. Predictably, those who come from the more privileged socio-economic backgrounds and are able to attend the better colleges score higher on the exam.

To adjust the scales and compensate those students in schools of low academic quality, the Selective Service authorities asked colleges last year to compute and forward students' class ranks. This guarantees the better students in each school a deferment. Ranking has now become an integral part of the 2-S deferment -- an attempt to render more equitable an inherently discriminatory system.

But ranking strikes at the very foundations of the educational system which the 2-S was designed to protect. Selective Service, in an attempt to modify the harsher aspects of the 2-S, has turned the task of helping to select draftable students over to the professors. Many teachers are unwilling to do the dirty-work, and feel that Selective Service has introduced an extraneous and corrosive element into student-faculty relations.

Ranking is also detrimental to the educational system because (a) it intensifies competition for grades at a time when many colleges -- including Harvard -- are trying to de-emphasize their importance; (b) grades were never intended to affect in any way the military status of a student; (c) grades are not a solid criterion for selection of recruits since they very so wildly among professors, departments, and colleges; (d) self-protective grade-grubbing in many cases may inhibit intellectual experimentation -- a student will hesitate to take a course that he might not do well in, but in which he might be interested; (e) to divide students into quartiles or thirds may force the Selective Service to choose between students whose academic averages are virtually the same.

The Harvard faculty, and its counterpart at all universities, should publicly disavow the destructive aspects of ranking, arguing that they are but one symptom of the basically misconceived student deferment.