The same powers which can discriminate against civil rights workers can and have been used against antiwar activists. Legally, those powers are hard to fight. Appeal can only be made to higher SSS boards, and judicial review of local board action is "so limited as to be non-existent," says the ACLU in their publication Civil Liberties. To exhaust the legal possibilities within the SSS, which is the only way to receive a court hearing, one must refuse induction and thereby be subject to prosecution.
IV
The SSS's euphemism "deferment" is defined as "putting off, postponing, delaying." Students are allowed to "put off" the questions posed by the SSS for four years, or longer. During that time a whole spectrum of reactions appear within the student population. The "I-want-to-serve" reaction, due to the unpopularity of the war in colleges, concerns only a small minority of students. The "ROTC" reaction argues that service is inevitable, so one might as well order as be ordered; and one might as well earn as much as possible. Those who illustrate the "adaptation" reaction follow closely all developments in the SSS, and try to orient their educational and occupational plans in order to evade the long arms of the SSS. The "CO" reaction is for those whose primary concern is moral or religious, and the number of applicants has risen steadily over the last few years.
Because a number of college students find the war and the SSS opposed to their values, the "we-won't go" reaction is becoming more wide-spread. A recent Crimson poll of the Harvard senior class revealed that roughly a quarter of the seniors would go to jail or leave the country, if all other alternatives failed, rather than fight in the present war. Finally, the "resistance" reaction makes it clear that many have decided that the time to say no is now. The hundreds of cards which have been turned in or burned signify not only unwillingness to fight, but also unwillingness to tacitly support an organization which forces others to fight.
It seems that the nation's "trouble" with its youth concerning the draft is growing. This is partly because more students are wondering if the SSS is something more than an insignificant aberration from the values of our society. More and more are concluding that the SSS does represent the prevailing outlook, and that the only way to prevent the disastrous fulfillment of the self-fulfilling prophecy is to resist the organization which most inflexibly enforces that outlook--the SSS.
The increased "trouble" comes from the concerned members of this generation who are beginning to realize that the effects of the SSS's definition of "national interest" are not to be limited to the present. Quite the opposite. Because the military-science attitude affects primarily the youth of our country, not only the progress of the present but the progress of the future is being stagnated.
When a young man computes the cost of the Vietnam war, to see if Camus' relative order of importance of means and ends is indeed reasonable, he must calculate as sacrificed much more than American dead, South and North Vietnamese dead, billions spent for destruction, and the dissipated energy of dissent. To find the real sum, a young man must also compute the cost for a few decades to come--the cost of decades provided with men who were forced to learn to approach the world in terms of the past, rather than in terms of the future.
For the college as well as the student, the issue of the war has finally been brought home--if not by radicals, then at least by the SSS. Students who are concerned about occupational choice cannot fail to see the sacrifice of academic freedom. Finally college administrations, if their concern is education rather than simply the supply of "more effective human beings," cannot fail to see the sacrifice of academic goals.
If either students or colleges blindly fail to see this, they will be defaulting their role as progressive leaders in this country, just as this country is defaulting that role in the world.