"Taking a McNamara Fellowship"

No other group is sheltered from the draft more securely than college students, but it is these students, by and large, who are most eloquent in their doubts about the system. It hits them at just the wrong time, pushing them into a hasty choice between the Army and a graduate education they may or may not have intended. It introduces an enormous element of uncertainty into their lives, for there is no one who can offer them dispassionate and specific information about when they may be drafted, or how they might usefully serve with the least disruption to their lives. And at a time when lives and careers are being planned, it confronts them with an obligation that is fundamentally unattractive and very difficult to fulfill.

These are minor complaints, but they add up to a major headache for the Selective Service System. Chicago congressman Roman Pucinski estimated in 1963 that 126,000 men presumably fit for service had reached the age of twenty-six through various deferments during the preceding year, and had thus managed to avoid their draft obligations altogether.

No one outside the academic world seems to realize how easy it has been for college students to evade the draft. A student might graduate from college at twenty-one, and then take a job for a year. If the draft threatened him, he could enroll in a local university and claim to be studying toward an M.A. After a year or two at work, he could duck back into graduate school and be assured of reaching his twenty-sixth birthday without being called, as long as his grades held up.

If working for a year didn’t appeal to him, our student could move directly into graduate school on the assumption that he would acquire some kind of permanent deferment — like a wife and children — during his years there.

Draft-dodging was particularly easy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the number of men eligible for the draft far exceeded the number of men required. Some draft boards were advised to give a deferment to anyone who sought one; so many men were available that strict deferment rulings seemed pointless.

This leniency had its obvious result: college students felt themselves relieved of their military obligation. No one else was serving, so why should they? Harvard, which takes a careful count of its seniors’ postgraduate plans, found last year that only 9 percent of them planned to enter the Armed Forces, a decrease from 21 percent in 1957, when the surveys were begun. On campuses where the students are rich and the war unpopular, a senior who is entering the service is still an exception. Graduate school and scholarship-hunting is so much the rule among students that enlisting in the Army is jokingly known as “taking a McNamara Fellowship.”

What’s wrong with these college kids? Have they lost their patriotism, or their courage? By and large, the answer is no. Every educational cliché specialist now knows that college is becoming a hyphen between high school and graduate school. When the draft was set up in its present form in 1951, college was the end of education for most people. Today advisers argue that graduate study is necessary for prospective job hunters, and it is a rare student who can go through four years of college without hearing at least one suggestion that he “go on and do serious work” at the graduate level.

The draft has narrowed the choice for him: it is the Army or graduate school. And when he thinks about the first alternative, his thoughts are likely to turn more and more to the second. For the Army is asking of him what he seems to have least of: time.

The services seem to punish rather than reward enlistment. To be drafted is to go into the service for two years with a two-year ready-reserve requirement that is a nuisance but not an especially time-consuming one. A few programs in the Army permit two-year enlistments, but for most prospective recruits, military service means a threeor four-year hitch. There is, of course, the six months program, but it carries with it a five-and-a-half-year reserve requirement that many consider too risky.

You can argue with a senior all you like. You can tell him that it’s easier to be admitted to graduate school after service (some graduate school deans agree, some don’t). You can tell him about special programs in the Army. But he’s likely to envision himself starting his career three years after his classmates, or entering graduate school three years removed from his col ege courses. Or he sees a reserve requirement that claws away at traveling fellowships (you can’t leave the country without your unit’s permission) and business travel (if you’re absent from many reserve meetings, you’re drafted).

There are other factors that confuse student relationships with the Selective Service. The system of local boards, for instance, is supposed to make the draft more personal, more equitable. But a student attending a college away from his hometown can get little specific advice about when he is likely to be drafted if he leaves school, or whether he might be called out of grad school.

Perhaps the ultimate case was that of a student who ranked in the top ten in his second-year class in a prestigious Eastern law school. One day he received a I-A classification in the mail and called his draft board, 2000 miles away. They told him he was certain to be inducted within a month, but would be permitted to finish the year in school if he enlisted immediately for induction in June. He did: a week later another letter told him the reclassification had been a mistake.

Many students are genuinely torn about the draft. They feel they owe some kind of service. But when the pluses and minuses are added up, most prefer the advantages and protectiveness of graduate school to the patriotic extravagance of a twoto three-year tour in some routine military assignment. When 90 percent of one’s classmates are staying out of the service, all the strongest temptations say one thing: don’t go in.

It goes without saying that the draft will quickly absorb almost every healthy twenty-year-old American who isn’t in college. And it cannot help but rankle these soldiers to know that many of their contemporaries are beyond the reach of the draft. The draft is admittedly based on inequity. But the services can’t get along without it. When the Selective Service Act lapsed between March, 1947, and June, 1948, the Armed Forces dropped from a desired strength of 2,000,000 men to 1,384,000 before conscription was hastily reinstituted.

Government officials, however, have been unwilling to consider a truly universal draft. Before the stepped-up calls that accompanied the increase in American troops in Vietnam last summer, an American nineteen-year-old stood almost a one-intwo chance of reaching his twenty-sixth birthday without receiving the letter of greetings from the President. Half the available men were enough to satisfy the military. To take more, they felt, would create a huge pool of men with nothing to do.

Since the draft is necessary, and the manpower pool too large, the services discriminate in many ways. They reject people of low intelligence (who can’t pass the qualifying test) and people with physical handicaps that would go unnoticed in civilian life. They protect fathers, farmers, sole surviving sons, ministers, conscientious objectors, workers who are “essential to the national defense,” and a few platoonsful of others. But the people most helped by the draft inequity are those smart enough, or lucky enough, or rich enough, to be students. And if students aren’t happy with the way the system works, it can be safely assumed that it isn’t working to the advantage of anyone directly concerned, except, perhaps, the Armed Forces.

There are many proposals for reform, and all of them will bear a great deal of study. The draft law comes up for renewal again in 1967. But unless the Armed Services committees hold extensive hearings, and start them early in the session, the tendency will be for a routine extension to slide through as it did in 1963. An attempt at reform will be worth the effort. There must be some system that is capable of supplying the military needs as well as the present one does, but it can be both fairer and more efficient than the one we now have.