The University and the Draft

...There are alternatives to the present system of military service, and perhaps some of the university professors who are apparently well-qualified for such work by virtue of the impressive terms of their consultantships to the Federal government could begin to investigate, on their own time, such ideas as a blanket four-year deferment for all students, no student deferment whatever, a lottery, or the raising of an entirely voluntary army...

...others pursue a corollary of this argument when they see our draft policies dividing the poor from the rich and the black from the white...

...This depends on the community's understanding of the university and its function...

...This kind of discrimination would guard the campuses against being overrun with intellectual delinquents in search of custodial care, and would at the same time restore the object of education as individual, rather than comparative, growth...

...In other words, I am saying that whatever their feelings about national service, about moral responsibility, about social justice, or about Vietnam, our universities and our professors must refuse to supply information (and probably to create it in the first place) on student grades, class ranking, or other indices of intellectual performance, for the purposes (among others) of maintaining the Armed Forces...

...Then, when the B.A...

...The object of a university is, after all, not to mirror the chaos of the world but to straighten it out...

...All very well, our prudent faculty friends will say, but why choose this very dramatic form of protesting irrelevant competitive pressures when these pressures have been with us for many years, and we have not seen fit heretofore to clean up our own shop...

...Another argument against non-cooperation was given unexpected dignity recently by John F. Morse of the American Council on Education, who defended present Selective Service policies on the grounds that no one has come up with any better way of utilizing manpower, and who defended university cooperation with these policies on the grounds that the Selective Service is merely asking the universities to perform a clerical function by providing a statistic (male class rank) which "exists as a mathematical object" whenever grades exist...

...THINKING ALOUD The University and the Draft By Lawrence Grauman Jr I have spent the better part of a week groping through the literature (in the broadest sense) of the student draft deferment controversy...

...From this mind-boggling commerce of rhetoric two conclusions may be extracted: Almost no one who has anything to do with education is satisfied with the system of student draft deferment, as it now operates...

...At the same time, a number of law schools, including Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Michigan and Pennsylvania, have become concerned by the obsession of some employers with the precision of "hard" data, and have decided not to release such information as rank-in-class...

...It is a first step long deferred, and, as Harry Truman said Lawrence Grauman Ir., a previous contributor to these pages, has recently been appointed as a Danjorth Teaching Fellow in the Humanities at Antioch College...

...Although the response of university administrators to these issues has been predictably timid, compared to that of faculty and students, at least two presidents (Kingman Brewster at Yale and Buell Gallagher at the City College of New York) have publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the operation of the draft...

...Princeton (which has not been known as avant garde at least since Woodrow Wilson left) and Wittenberg have instituted a limited number of courses in which no grade other than "pass" or "fail" is given, in order to encourage students to seek new and perhaps strange experiences without fear of impairing their grade-point average (generally acquired in "safe" courses...

...Indeed, some scholars would extend this idea to argue that it is precisely our use of coercion, in contrast with negotiation, which many people in the country have perceived as the major issue in Vietnam, and what they as scholars are feeling in the colleges is exactly the result of our coercive role in international affairs...

...The last objection that is likely to be made by sympathetic but uneasy educators is that whatever subversion of the university may be done is already done when transcripts are required by draft boards, so there is little additional damage in giving class standing...

...If more reliance were placed on such "intangibles" as these, graduate schools would not be so constricting and oppressive, industry would not be so dull and self-serving, and Phi Beta Kappa would not be so irrelevant...

...And now we cannot tell where ends begin and means end...

...If graduate schools, foundations, industries and Phi Beta Kappa cannot make their decisions on the basis of a combination of written professorial evaluations, the reputation of a student's school, the record of his own decisions, and his own testimony, they probably have no business trying to be selective...

...It is the ultimate distraction...

...The argument will be that we cannot legally withhold transcripts...

...Secondly, we must begin to distinguish between those aspects of the problem that pose genuinely difficult questions of social and historical magnitude, and those that can be safely left to the protective deliberation of deans and Harper's magazine editors...

...Free and independent universities have existed where the control of the state was unchallenged...

...and finally there was the Selective Service System, which merely asked to borrow those statistics that we had given G.E...

...As for the universities themselves, they should be able to get along quite well with a "pass/fail" or "pass/pass-with-honors/fail" system of grading...

...They originally told their students: "You have come to college to learn how to read a book, how to understand the ideas which underlie the learned professions, and how to ask important questions about your cultural heritage...

...others oppose only involvement in specific wars, obviously Vietnam...

...It depends, therefore, on the tradition within which the university operates...

...but as an educator this position seems to me an imperative, and one long deferred...

...Can we legally cease to supply information on student academic performance to the draft, and continue to supply it to the institutions we consider "legitimate...

...Or, as President Brewster of Yale has put it, "it is unthinkable that the institution would fail to cooperate with a student who requested that his class rank be submitted to his draft board...

...On the other hand, in this context I cannot take very seriously the consequences of letting the students occupy the administration building in overnight protest...

...The administration of the University of Chicago (of all places) has defended present practices on the grounds that it is immoral for a university to prevent an individual student from exercising his legal right to seek deferment on the basis of his rank in class...

...Now, although we still insist that our students come to college to learn how to read a book, we know that many come to learn how to get a higher grade-point average than Charlie, Sam and Irving so that they may stay out of Vietnam...

...Moreover, what would happen to those institutions-graduate schools, businesses, foundations, Phi Beta Kappa-if we simply ceased altogether to supply such information as grades and class standing...

...Whatever the legality of withholding transcripts, the question of computing rank in class for men (as the draft boards now request) is surely one of legal obscurity...

...Now if the consequences of this unprecedented concern for the responsibilities of the university to a country at war are not to be as ambiguous and ultimately negligible as were the reactions of the academic community to that other sorry episode in school-state relations called McCarthyism, we are going to have to undertake some immediate rhetorical housecleaning to determine what is really at stake...

...More importantly, we will have to determine which of these crucial matters we can do something about and which we can't...

...Now let us consider some of the more persuasive arguments against withholding academic information from the Selective Service System...

...A man may advance several distinct views of the harmfulness of the student draft deferment system without necessarily falling into logical contradiction...

...In the first place, I see no reason for-and many reasons against-continuing to even create such indices of performance as rank-in-class and precisely calibrated grades...

...For example, I do not think that the question of whether or not we should have any selective service system whatever is easily answered-at least it becomes quite untractable to me beyond the level of metaphysical truth...

...These same men for decades have been trying to act as if the business of grading were but a negligible though vaguely necessary evil...

...As a man and a citizen I can sense haunting ambiguities in our national life, I can concede the possibility of higher values in a complex hierarchy...

...Or else they must give up all pretense of offering a liberal education...

...we have seen many students shopping for easy courses to get into medical school, and we have seen them flocking to teachers who are reputed to be easy graders to get into General Electric-the only difference is that now they will come to college not merely to learn how to make an A, not merely to learn how to make a higher A than their classmate, but to learn how to make a higher A than their classmate so that they may stay alive...

...Some people believe the fundamental issue to be the university's cooperation with the machinery of war, any war...

...Neither an earnest proposal nor a modest one, I suspect, since my friend is himself a third-generation Jewish immigrant...

...There are those, like a committee of professors in the Midwest, who see the greatest threat in terms of an unacknowledged aristocracy, in that they believe the growing emphasis on I.Q...

...Although students do have "legal rights" and universities do have the responsibility to "cooperate" with their students, it seems to me that universities, students, and teachers all have a higher responsibility: to the quality of the experience which has made them what they are and what they wish to be, a responsibility to that tradition of liberal learning which they purport to preserve...

...It is worth recalling in this regard that the very act of Congress which created student deferments was informed by the sense of the educational experience to the national welfare...

...To begin with we must realize that the sentiments so strenuously held by our teachers and students, not all of which I have just summarized, are not mutually exclusive...

...The primary responsibility of all educators and of those who consider themselves "friends of education," as the phrase goes, is to devote themselves to the development of this tradition...

...If all colleges and universities were to refuse to compute this information, I doubt that draft boards would demand it...

...Yet there are numerous occasions when cooperation with these other interests is an appropriate enterprise, and one cannot determine in advance which occasions these will be...

...Nor am I too much worried by the seemingly earnest proposal of a fellow teacher that all Negroes, Puerto Ricans, rednecks, etc., should be sent to Vietnam in order to spare the productive intellectual flower of our generation-like me and him...

...It would make as much educational sense to rank all virgin students...

...There are, however, as many different reasons for protesting the university's role in the Selective Service System as there are protestants...

...But the relationship of law and the university must be seen in different terms...

...Even granting that this brief history of the professor's real problem is enlivened somewhat by dramatic hyperbole, the awful truth remains that if our student cannot understand "Sailing to Byzantium" the chance of his being drafted is increased...

...The effect of these inspiring innovations is of course all but nullified by the insistence of the draft boards that class standing and test scores are valid determinants of the degree to which a student deserves to share in an educational experience, and even of the degree to which he deserves to live or die...

...Everyone agrees that because of its role in society a university must remain essentially independent of other interests, public or private...

...The crucial point in the management of universities is whether and when the legal control is exercised...

...As a private citizen I may sympathize with General Hershey's agonizing multiple choices, but as an educator I cannot afford to let the Selective Service director into my classroom...

...When the Selective Service commandeers the university to help it to make its particular decisions on individual registrants, it damages that which it is trying to protect...

...Still others, like Milton Mayer (writing in a recent issue of the Progressive), see "the professor's problem" as a personal, moral one...

...The history of education shows that the crucial point in the management of universities is not who has the legal control...

...Of course we have lived with this subversive competitive influence for a long time...

...I have read newspaper articles, Congressional testimony, Federal statutes, letters from teaching colleagues, petitions, faculty manifestos, student manifestos, secret memorandums from university administrators (the secret communications are invariably the dullest...

...As Harry Truman used to say, "the buck stops here...

...It is worth noting that several colleges and universities have recently undertaken tentative reforms of this kind...

...But above all we must recognize that though there is in relation to the student deferment issue no simple or single moral imperative, there is an intellectual imperative: Any institution that considers itself a repository of the liberal arts tradition, any instructor who believes himself to be a product of an independent, critical education, cannot afford to cooperate in any way with the process of selecting young men for military service-not because war is unjust (though it may be), and not because this war is more unjust than most (though I think it is), but because the competitiveness of our "selective" service is inimical to the most basic values of a true educational experience...

...He has apparently lost sight of what a university is for, and has confused the contributions that educators can make to the solution of a practical problem (and they can make them) with that which can be made by industrialists, politicians and clerks...

...and class standing is an extension of the same elitist mentality that is expressed in the very establishment of student deferments...

...Finally, let us consider some of the reservations and qualifications undoubtedly held by teachers and students who are otherwise sympathetic to the necessity for non-cooperation with the draft system...

...And the students, by their responses and decisions, showed that they knew why they were there: to learn how to get a B.A...

...Do we not have some obligation, they might ask, to help the Federal government solve its problems of national defense...

...So, in the beginning there were a few professors who wanted to help their students get better jobs with General Electric...

...This last alternative, my own preference, does not seem to have been adequately explored in recent years...

...had become debased into a certificate of time served and a qualification for membership in the University Club, we were still telling our students, "You have come to college to learn how to read a book," but the students were replying, "No, we have come to learn how to make an A, so that we may finish in the upper quarter of our class and get into a good graduate school, or, if necessary, a good firm...

...We do not have much left in the way of a liberal tradition of learning in this country, if indeed we ever really did have such a tradition, but there are still some colleges and some teachers who insist that their job is to teach students how to live with ideas, how to think critically and imaginatively, and who consequently refuse to offer vocational training or to act as adolescent custodians...

...We may continue to talk incessantly of individual intellectual development and the formation of personal critical values, yet our student knows that, irrespective of the quality of his own experience, his life has become more valuable than the life of a non-student, and that in fact the value of his life is now proportional to his grade-point average...

...If the competitive pursuit of knowledge corrupts this tradition, then it cannot be tolerated, whatever inconvenience its elimination may cause...

...and there is almost no agreement among the teachers, students and education officials who actively oppose deferment practices as to the grounds on which they take their opposition...

...In recent months resolutions have been passed against the present Selective Service Administration guidelines by faculty senates and chapters of the American Association of University Professors at many colleges, among them Wayne State, Colby, San Francisco State (where a strong statement was unanimously adopted), New York University, the State University of New York at Buffalo and at Stony Brook, the University of Iowa, Cornell, and the University of Michigan...

...I wonder where Morse has gotten the idea that universities are responsible for developing better methods of manpower deployment, or are obliged to accept the present imperfect methods...

...And then, of course, there are the inevitable cries of invasion of academic freedom, a recourse that-whatever it expresses in other campus conflicts-may be reasonably interpreted in this case as a protest against coercion, which is an intrinsic part of the current conscription system...

...and then there was the CIA, which only wanted a little legal advice...

...it is " whether to present his students with their most inspiriting example of servitude to truth or their most dispiriting example of subservience to falsehood," and, further, whether to yield to the demand that he " decide which of these young men are to be spared for a season and which of them are to be bound aboard the black-sailed ship destined for the Labyrinth " The students have their moral problems too, claiming that he who does well will deprive one of his classmates of his deferment and possibly his life...

...On the other hand, universities established by private interests have been wrenched beyond recognition by the pressures that have been brought to bear on them...

...Similarly, I do not think that the propriety of university participation in defense work of various shades is a matter that can be resolved tomorroweven if it should be...

...Doubtless a good question...

...The first step toward the fulfillment of this responsibility is to exclude from the university those activities which are not proper to it, which prevent understanding of the purpose of the university, and which create confusion in regard to it...

...Since universities have no clearer conception of the conditions of profitable cooperative endeavor than governments or baseball teams, they have allowed their independence to be eaten away bit by bit, simply because in each little instance it was the path of least resistance, and because the consequences of their decisions were not clearly forseen and accounted for...