Life & Death Grades

The breath of the draft burns ever hotter on the neck of the U.S. college man-stirring an ever more passionate debate on the rights and wrongs of 2-S, Selective Service's classification for draft deferment for students. The specific issue is whether grades should determine exemption, and consequently whether colleges should reveal low grades to draft boards. The loftier issue is whether simply being in college entitles a boy to avoid conscription.

Many teachers feel that giving grades has turned into an awesome power over a student's future. U.C.L.A. Philosophy Professor C. Wade Savage says that deciding between a D and F makes him feel that he has "that student's life in my hands-and that's not the feeling a professor wants when he's giving a grade." At California State College in Los Angeles, Philosophy Instructor Beverly Woodward quit because, she says, her position was "morally intolerable-I know of no way of measuring the value of a given human life."

"I don't believe that the university can survive any further intrusion by the military," argues Brandeis Sociology Chairman John R. Seeley. "We have dirtied our hands enough with lucre. I don't want to see them dirtied by blood." He is leading a fight, so far unsuccessful, to get the Brandeis administration to refuse to divulge student grades to draft boards.

Seymour Melman, industrial engineering professor at Columbia, has proposed that teachers give A's to all their students to avoid such choices. His Columbia colleague, Henry Linford, chemical engineering professor, retorted that "You can't botch up our educational system just to circumvent a Government order," and Dean David Truman calls overgrading a "violation of intellectual trust." Some students concede that they will choose easy courses to keep their grades high. An advertisement in the University of Michigan Daily urged coeds to muff their exams so the men could rank higher.

Most colleges plan to cooperate fully with draft boards, although some (including Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Michigan) will withhold grades if a student requests it. After that, says Harvard Dean John Monro, "What he does is between him and his draft board."

Good for Dropouts? For many students, deferment by grades will become irrelevant in May and June, when, if they wish, they can take the Selective Service System's 1966 College Qualification Test, which is intended to be a uniform standard. It is not overly difficult ("If 2 erasers cost 6 cents, how many erasers can be bought for 36 cents?"), but some students still argue that draft boards have no right to take any evidence of academic ranking into account as a basis for conscription.

Most students know that draft exemption for college men tends to put the burden of military service on their non-college peers. Cornell's Professor Douglas Dowd sees no reason "why the fighting should be confined to underprivileged persons unable to get into college." Students who agree mostly "take their principles out for a short walk," as one Notre Dame student puts it, and welcome their immunity. A Harvard senior contends that "the army is good for dropouts, the unskilled, and those who might otherwise fall into the poor of the future." Michigan Senior Richard Bereza contends that people "who aren't quite as capable are better able to endure the boredom of military life."

Saving Intellectuals? Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, however, finds "something morally questionable" in the deferment of students. "If we were an African country with six educated people and needed all of them as ambassadors, the situation would be different." Berkeley's Aaron Wildavsky, a political science associate professor, proposes a random, lottery-like selection among all draft-age men. Berkeley Sophomore Andrew C. McGall says, "I don't think it is fair to keep me in school and draft another kid who is not in school. I don't see why he should die before me. I don't go for the idea of saving intellectuals."

As long as the draft demands only a small part of the nation's manpower, it has to be highly selective, hence "unfair"-and college students can argue that they deserve deferment just as much as the millions of young fathers and men between 26 and 36 who are now exempt. Since only 11% of the total draft-age population is in service -and only 3.7% of all draftees are college graduates-the draft pressure on the campus is still mostly academic.

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