It is next year. Now, it is the fall of next year. Snow turned to rain, to dirty tire-gray streams in the sidewalk ice. Then spring came slowly, stayed shortly. Commencement was not crisp and bright. The sky was thick and the ground was heavy. Then we lost them--the seniors--they disappeared in the witches' kettle of summer. We have not seen them since. And now it is the fall, and soggy leaves lie in the gutter like Corn Flakes left in the bowl too long.

We heard something about them--the seniors. The news came back slowly in scraps. Someone was shot dead through the neck. Someone was in Canada. Someone was just being arraigned for refusing to be inducted. Someone came back to Cambridge, on the run, to see us. He had been in Chicago last summer.

Everyone had been in Chicago last summer. They tried to surround the auditorium where the Democratic Convention was going on. They had little to lose. They were going to jail anyway, they said. One of the troops fired, and there was a riot. The black neighborhood exploded. That was Chicago. Everyone was in Chicago last summer. But now it is fall, and Chicago is gone.

We heard them all say it last year, how nobody was going to get them. Somehow they would get out of it. But they did not get out of it. And in the summer most of them disappeared, and all we see now are scraps boiling to the surface in the pot.

I.

THE name of the sport is Drafting Harvard. Everyone plays--faculty, administration, students, and the Selective Service System. The way it goes is this: the Selective Service tells the students that they can only go to college for four years. No more graduate school, unless you want to be something helpful, like a doctor, or a dentist, or a veterinarian, or an osteopath, or an optometrist, or a chiropodist, or a minister, or a research scientist. Or, you can be something else helpful, like a farmer, or an apprentice riveter, or a glass-blower, or the Vice President of the United States. The Selective Service makes the rules: how sick you can be, how crazy, how tall, how immoral, how ignorant, how conscientious.

Next, the students, who have to play the game, try to "get around" the rules, try to get out of serving by legal means. Why, you can run for the Massachusetts legislature and get elected--that would get you out. Or, you can get the girl you are living with pregnant. According to Selective Service System Regulations Section 1622.30 (a), that will get you a III-A exemption, provided you keep living with her.

Game Goes On

The game goes on. Why not let the Selective Service have what it wants? Ninety-four per cent of the class is opposed to the war, about half of them on grounds of conscience.

For them, Drafting Harvard should not be a game. They do not want to play at all. Many of them refuse. They resign, and the Selective Service gobbles them up or throws them into jail.

For the seniors who bothered, who were not real "Walter Mittys," in the words of one University President, the spring was a hectic scramble to get out of service legally. Many hired lawyers to give them advice and to defend them if they needed it. Others looked into bizzare possibilities: setting up an agricultural cooperative to gain II-C exemptions as farmers, applying to Divinity School, undergoing psychoanalysis. For many, the ploys worked. But the pressure was enormous. For many, the greater part of the Spring semester was spent trying to figure out ways to evade the draft, and failing.

Self-interest predominated. Two years ago, in the beginning of the controversy over the draft, Harvard students complained that the system was highly discriminatory, favoring the well-off. They called the II-S student deferment an unfair advantage for those who could go to college.

The costs of medical and psychiatric examinations and the costs of lawyers were beyond the reach of the lower classes. As a result, the poor, mainly ghetto Negroes would go first. The outcry here was sensitive and altruistic. Some students gave up their II-S deferments, but, mainly, people waited for the new draft law.

When it came, nothing was different, except the state of the war. It had intensified, grown more immoral, and more illegal. The altruism was forgotten. What was most important was saving your own skin--preventing yourself from being in a position where you would have to kill a man you thought you had no right to kill. It is too bad the altruism has been forgotten. The Selective Service System remains highly discriminatory even as the war grows worse.

Of the 16,632 draft board members, who make the ultimate decisions on who goes and who does not, only 1.3% are Negroes, 0.8% Puerto Ricans, 0.7% Orientals, and 0.1% American Indians. Conrad J. Lynn writes in his new book, How to Stay Out of the Army: "This discrepancy in representation may in part explain why in 1964, for example, 30.2% of qualified Afro-Americans were drafted but only 18.8% of qualified whites."