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But the hottest issue is whether students should be deferred at all—and if so, whether on the basis of IQ standards, class standing or performance in the newly revived college-qualification draft examinations, which 650.000 have already taken and another 200,000-plus are expected to take this week and on June 24.
Yale President Kingman Brewster is almost savage in his denunciation of the draft policy that allows broadside college deferments: "It is unfair; it is undemocratic; and—worst of all—it fosters a cynical disrespect for national service and corrupts the aims of education." Princeton President Robert Francis Goheen argues that because draft calls are still relatively small, the system is "unnecessarily erratic in what it does to young men's lives. Great inequities occur which are not compensated for by any real social gain. We have enough educated manpower that just the pursuit of a Ph.D. in history, classics or chemistry, for example, is not important enough to justify deferment."
Plenty of students agree, even those most deeply involved. Philip Pendleton Ardery Jr., 20, a cum laude (English) Harvard senior who has resigned himself to going into the service ("When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"), waxes cynical: "Students really have too good a deal. And with the tests, what you're doing is trying to decide what people have the right to die—and to do that on the basis of anything as arbitrary as intellect seems really wrong."
Who's Unfair? Oddly enough, high school kids—even Negro high school kids, who supposedly bear the brunt of inequity—are not terribly perturbed. Draft-bound Donnie E. Smith, 18. a senior at New York's Charles Evans Hughes High School, has kept his cool about it all: "If the college guys are sticking with it and want to get further, why take them out? Everybody tells you they want you to get an education; they're doing the opposite of what they say if they take the college students out." Donald ("King") White, 18, about to graduate from Manhattan's Louis D. Brandeis High School, thinks that it might be unfair to defer college students: "If they dodge the draft, I'm against them; if they're going to do good for the community, I'm with them.''
Lieut. General Lewis B. Hershey, now 72 and head of the selective-service system since it started, doesn't think it makes much sense to change policies now. "We have to start with the as sumption that American policy presumes a college graduate is better prepared to be a citizen for all reasons than a nongraduate," he says. Turning the statistical tables on his anti-college-deferment critics, he says: "Look at the people who are serving. Who are they? They're most likely to be the middle-class and upper-class person. Those denied a chance to go to school are not included: some 2,500,000 are rejected because they cannot pass the mental test. That's unfair to the college student."