Students Sign Cards Permitting Draft Boards to Receive Grades

Most Harvard undergraduates yesterday waived their right to be consulted when a draft board asks for their academic record.

By signing a blue card included in their registration envelopes, they gave the Registrar's Office unrestricted permission to furnish their grades to local draft boards. There had been no previous announcement that they would have to make the choice at registration.

Dean Monro said yesterday that the last-minute decision to include the cards was made at the request of the Registrar's Office.

"We operate on the assumption that the draft boards want promptness and that anything else can hurt a student's chances," he said. "And we saw that asking students individually for their permission might make it less and less possible for us to be prompt."

Students were advised not to sign the card yesterday by officers of the Students for a Democratic Society, who stood in the Memorial Hall corridor until a janitor asked them to leave.

"This way, you'll find yourself 1-A without warning, without knowing why," one of the officers, Eric Lessinger '68, had told students as they filed past. Monro later said that the eviction was uncalled for and supported SDS' right to protest in Mem Hall.

Any student who has changed his mind since signing the card. Monro added, can have his name erased by the Registrar's Office. "We weren't trying to collect signatures," he said. "We were trying to provide a service."

But he pointed out that students who signed the card will still be notified when their draft board asks for their grades a least for the present.

"We'll notify all students, those who have already given us their permission as well as those who haven't, unless the volume of requests from draft boards gets too great," he said.

Col. Paul F. Feeney, deputy director of Massachusetts Selective Service, confirmed yesterday that draft boards expect quick replies to their requests for grades. "If the board is right on the ball," he said, "it might reclassify a student whose grades are missing."

But students probably will not be drafted on the basis of their grades alone, Feeney explained. The nation-wide guidelines for student deferments, to be announced next month, will balance a student's class rank against his score on an aptitude test.

During the Korean War, Feeney said, a student who scored high in the test was deferred even though his class rank was low.