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The trend has been up in grad school for a long time. But I'm sure the draft is a factor to some degree." And Dean of Students Harold R. Metcalf of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business said this spring: "Our applications from would-be students are up 75% above last year. It would be naive not to suspect that the draft has a great deal to do with this."
Rhiman A. Rotz Jr., 23, a Princeton graduate student in history, says: "Anyone would be out of his mind to come to a grad school as hard as this one strictly to avoid the draft. But everyone here has at least thought of the draft as a factor, however minor, in his decision." Explains Gene Blumenrich, 23, a second-year Harvard Law School student who candidly admits that he wants to stay out of the service for good if he can: "It's not really a question of dying. If it were, then of course the student deferment is immoral. For all but a few, it is merely a question of spending two years of drudgery. It is just a pain in the neck, not a bullet in the head."
Judging the Tricky. Of course, most members of most of the country's 4,050 local draft boards are aware of all the tricks. Many of them have been at work without pay ever since World War II. Says Dr. W. J. Greenway, eight-year veteran and chairman of the De Kalb County (Ga.) draft board: "If boys applying to graduate school stick to the same course as they had in undergraduate work, we favor that. But if a boy changes his major—well, there's where you run into your professional students. You can pretty well judge, though. And most of them are honest, anyway. The real tricky ones—you can cross 'em up with a few questions; they'll usually finally say they don't want to serve."
"My board tells me not to worry," sighs University of Utah Senior John Becker, 22, who has not yet been classified. "That's very comforting, but all the time you know they've got your file in front of them with their little rubber 1A stamp in their hand." Gripes Jeffrey Anderson, 23, a graduating history major at the University of California at Berkeley: "There just isn't any communication between the draft board and the individual. When I settle down with a family, I'm going to see about improving the local draft board system."
Of course, local boards are limited by the availability of fit males in their districts. Deferments are thus dished out on a strictly backyard basis. If an area runs out of nonessential, healthy single men. it is forced to move on to more essential healthy single men—such as students. Another board in another part of the U.S. may have enough 24-year-old out-of-school bachelors to last the entire Viet Nam period.
Undemocratic? Lately, dissent over both the mechanics and the morality of the U.S. selective-service system has reached a decibel count unmatched since the program first began—25 years, 81,000,000 registrants and 13,500,000 inductees ago. There are the predictable complaints about deferment of such people as New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath (4F with a legitimately bum knee) and Lynda Bird Johnson's boy friend, $200,000-a-year Actor George Hamilton (3A because he is his mother's sole support).