Three out of four students say that they will only join the Armed Services with "reluctance." Less than six per cent of the graduating class plans to enlist next year.

This must certainly represent some new kind of low in enthusiasm for the military under war-time conditions. Not only are students failing to flock to the recruiter, there are definite signs that they are actually avoiding him. For obvious reasons, the military has rarely aroused enthusiasm in academia; nonetheless it is interesting to note how far students have moved towards active dislike for the image of our fighting men abroad.

Of the few students who plan to join the military voluntarily in some capacity next year, the overwhelming majority disapprove of present U.S. policy in Vietnam and some of them even say that they will refuse to follow orders to fight in Vietnam. What this proves is that there are a number of students who are joining the military in order to avoid being sent to Vietnam. Crazy as this may sound, there is some logic to the madness. If one enlists, joins the Reserves, or enters some kind of officer training, there is a better chance of choosing the kind of job and part of the world to which one will be assigned than if one is drafted. Apparently the majority of Harvard seniors who have said they are going to enlist have this kind of motive in mind.

One hundred and thirty-seven students will apply for either a physical or psychological deferment--approximately one out of every four students polled.

Now certainly not all these students can be as sick or as crazy as they profess to be. There are undoubtely those among this group who are perfectly healthy. Most are at least as sturdy as the Southern farm boy who has just enlisted or the Black from one of our many ghettos who has just been drafted. The only difference is that the poor can't afford to have their ills diagnosed and recorded; they don't know that a migraine headache might get them out of the Army, they only know that they don't feel good sometimes. Most medical deferments, and almost all psychological deferments, are a luxury of the rich.

But if the poor are not "officially" sick, the rich man's burden is that he spends so much time convincing the draft board that he is unfit for military service that in the end he begins to believe his own put-on. There have been students who have gone through so much to convince their draft boards that they were crazy that in the end indeed they were.

What kind of society is it that rewards the young people who emphasize their mental and physical deformities? What is happening to the future elites of our society who are busy convincing themselves that they are misfits, irrelevant to the jobs for which they are being trained?

These are the real questions which seniors at Harvard and all over the country are grappling with this year. The immediate future is no longer the challenge that it should be in our advanced society. Instead it has become a series of moral confrontations. Our society preaches freedom and peace while it practices repression and violence. The wonder is that not more than one out of every four Harvard seniors sees his immediate future as anything less than an apocalyptic nightmare.