Draft Softening

THE Faculty, last year, failed to decide whether the University as an institution should disassociate itself from the Selective Service System by refusing to compute student rank lists. Now that II-S deferments are no longer granted on the basis of an undergraduate's scholastic standing, this issue of University draft "involvement" is gone. But President Johnson's February draft decisions pose a more practical question: Will units of the University help their graduate students to secure legal deferments to keep them out of the army?

The Government Department answered "yes" this week when it voted to award Master Degrees after only one year of graduate study. This action will make it easier for first-year graduate students to get part-time teaching jobs, positions that will qualify for the III-A occupational deferment for "essential community need." The Social Relations Department took similar action last January.

The move is both necessary and appropriate at this time. President Johnson's refusal to extend graduate deferments to fields other than medicine was fair. But he did not change the order of call, thus seeing to it that each month's draft call starting June will be two-thirds filled with this year's college seniors and first-year graduate students.

From the universities' point of view, Johnson made the worst possible move: a National Council of Graduate School study predicted that total U.S. graduate enrollment would drop 70 per cent because of it.

But more important, the decisions were also the most inequitable possible, since they place the burden of conscription almost solely on those two college groups. It is this inequity that the Harvard Departments--on their own initiative--should work to lessen.

STUDENT deferments themselves are of dubious validity. Secretary of Labor Wirtz has testified that they are unnecessary for maintaining an adequate supply of skilled manpower. They should be abolished entirely--but only as part of comprehensive draft reform, such as the Marshall Commission recommendations or Senator Edward M. Kennedy's reform bill now pending in the Senate.

But to correct the past inequity of deferring students by perpetrating a new one--drafting them almost exclusively--is absurd.

Johnson has given no indication that he will reconsider his draft decisions. Kennedy's bill has no chance of even being debated during this election year. Presidents Pusey, Brewster, and Goheen were unable to influence Johnson last fall. Now the Departments themselves must act.

The Soc Rel Department moved only after receiving a petition from its graduate students. A committee of Physics Department graduate students is being formed for the same purpose. The other Harvard Departments and their graduate students should follow these examples, acting now to do something about the draft.