Gloom in Grad Schools

Last summer Congress knocked out draft deferments for all university graduate students except those who will be beyond one year of such work by next June or those pursuing medical studies.* Now graduate-school deans are beginning to realize that unless the law is changed or Selective Service enlarges the list of deferrable disciplines, they could lose as many as half of their prospective students next year.

Atmosphere of Futility. Columbia Graduate Faculties Dean Herbert Deane admits to being "scared to death" by the situation. University concern centers mainly on the fact that the complex planning for next year's budgets, faculty assignments and graduate fellowships must be made long before summer. The uncertainty about just how many graduate students will be called up, and when, is creating what University of Southern California Associate Graduate Dean Charles G. Mayo calls "an atmosphere of futility."

Most schools seem to be fearing the worst. Stanford Graduate Division Dean Virgil Whitaker foresees a "potential catastrophic disruption" that could take 75% of the students now in their first year of graduate studies. Dartmouth's School of Business Administration figures that its total enrollment will drop at least 50%; graduate schools at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin peg the loss at about one-third; those at Yale, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts place it at 25%. Nearly all assume that most of their new students will be either wom en, veterans, foreigners, men with physical ailments or those over 25, which, under current practice, is the top draft age. "This is a pretty gloomy place," admits U.C.L.A. Graduate Division Dean Horace Magoun. "We cheer each other up by counting the number of students we know can't possibly be drafted."

In Expanded Facilities. The enrollment cutback--if it happens--would occur just at a time when most graduate schools have been expanding their facilities. The deans fear not only a sharp drop in income from tuition, but also a crippling of the research now largely carried out by graduate students on behalf of their supervising professors. Since graduate students also carry much of the undergraduate teaching load at big universities, a depletion of their ranks would force some professors out of their labs and libraries and back into classrooms. That, in turn, might force research-oriented scholars to switch to universities where the teaching demand was not so great.

Graduate deans do not contend that all their students should be deferred. "That would be utterly immoral," says Berkeley Graduate Division Dean Sanford S. Elberg. But the universities argue that, whenever possible, students should be called before they enter grad school or after receiving their degrees--and not in academic midstream. Indicating the extent of the schools' concern, the Association of American Universities and the Council of Graduate Schools have petitioned the Defense Department to spell out precisely how many graduate students will be drafted. Professors at many universities are busy writing their Congressmen, friends in the Pentagon and even the President, asking for clarification.

* Including medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, osteopathy and optometry.

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