Princeton Dean to Re-Admit Resisters After Prison Term

Princeton graduate students who serve terms in jail for resisting the draft will be readmitted with no loss of credit and a maximum of financial aid, Colin Pittendrigh, dean of Princeton's graduate school, said yesterday.

"Students acting out of sincere moral conviction who have gone to jail and paid their civil debt will not be placed in double jeopardy," he said.

He claimed, however, that the New York Times, in an article published yesterday, misquoted him by saying that such a policy would also apply to students who had fled to Canada rather than go to jail here. "The question is much less clear here," he said, "and would have to be decided on individual cases."

"Students who come back from Canada will probably also have to go to jail," he added, "so that this second group is really only a subset of the first, but they have to be regarded from a very different point of view. They may have paid their civil debt but they ran away from it in the beginning."

Pittendrigh added, however, that he did not expect many students to follow this course, since "no graduate students is likely to be so stupid that he won't think his decision out carefully. Going to jail or running off to Canada is more than simply a way to avoid something distasteful."

He does not expect the school's position to make any difference in any student's decision, he said, because "such a decision is based on moral grounds, not on mere convenience."