What happened in colleges during the Vietnam War protests?
All classes at the university were cancelled, and a series of seminars and speeches on Vietnam issues continued for 12 hours. Almost immediately, “teach-ins” spread to other colleges across the nation. From such benign origins, the anti-war movement would change as the war did, becoming ever more violent.
Why were college students protesting the Vietnam War?
By 1969, the campus anti-war movement began to collapse. Republican President Richard Nixon suspected that most students protested the Vietnam War because they feared being drafted. He ended the student deferment and established a draft lottery.
How did the Vietnam War affect college students?
Our key finding is that the Vietnam-era draft led to a rise in male college attendance rates between 1965 and 1970, and a corresponding rise in college completion rates for men born between 1945 and 1950, with a peak impact of about 2 percentage points for men born in 1947.
How did the Vietnam War draft affect college students?
Did college get you out of the Vietnam draft?
At the outbreak of the Vietnam War, Harvard students were safe from the draft. College undergraduate and graduate students were automatically awarded draft status 2-S–deferment for postsecondary education–and could not be forced to serve. For those opposed to the war, it was a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Did college students get drafted?
Fair and Equitable Draft Before Congress reformed the draft in 1971, a man could qualify for a student deferment if he could show he was a full-time student making satisfactory progress in virtually any field of study. He could continue to go to school and be deferred from service until he was too old to be drafted.
Did college kids get drafted in Vietnam?
Before the lottery was implemented in the latter part of the Vietnam conflict, there was no system in place to determine order of call besides the fact that men between the ages of 18 and 26 were vulnerable to being drafted. Local boards called men classified 1-A, 18-1/2 through 25 years old, oldest first.
