New Draft Law Threatens GSAS With Heavy Losses

(Fifth in a series of articles on how the new draft policy will affect Harvard's graduate schools.)

Officials at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences expect that the draft will hit the GSAS hard. Several factors, though, will hopefully keep disruption to a minimum.

Thomas K. Sisson '46, assistant dean of the GSAS, estimates that 40 per cent of the present first-year class is draft-vulnerable. He believes that almost all these people will be called for induction, and that few will fortuitously flunk their physicals.

Prospects for this autumn's entering class are even darker. One study predicts if all those eligible are indeed drafted, only 105 men and 242 women will be able to enroll in the school, in contrast to a usual entering class of about 933 students.

One mitigating influence may blunt the draft's damage. "We'd been seriously thinking of reducing the size of GSAS anyway," says Sisson. A committee on the "future of the Graduate School" is considering, among other matters, such a reduction.

As a result, though admissions policy lies in the hands of the individual department heads, who haven't released their decisions, Sisson does not think that they will try to ensure the usual number of first-year students by over-admitting applicants.

Sisson also feels prepared for the problems posed by the Selective Service because he "strongly suspected" several months ago that the National Security Council would rescind graduate deferments for all professions but medicine, as it did two weeks ago.

However reconciled to a diminished entering class next September, Sisson objects greatly to students' careers being interrupted after the first year of graduate work.

In fact, the present first-year class will probably sustain greater injury than next year's. Certain areas of study, such as the Natural Sciences, stand to suffer much more than others, and specific departments may see virtually an entire class of scholars wiped out, because these areas and departments have a greater proportion of students who may be drafted.

But in the meantime, until these returning people take up the slack, the school faces lean times. Sisson places no hope in local draft boards, which, he believes, "have absolutely no more autonomy," and he feels the GSAS must resign itself to a loss of up to one million dollars next year.

Still, Sisson sees Harvard's action essentially as weathering the storm. "I think it is abominable to ask the classes of '67 and '68 to provide two-thirds of this year's draft quota" he says, "but a lot of people have panicked, and we don't intend to."