The Asiatic Teach-ins

When the occasion demands, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky can be a very flexible fellow. He has at various times threatened to close all of Saigon's newspapers, line up the city's profiteering rice merchants before a firing squad, and advance the nightly curfew to 9 p.m. But when the drastic threats brought indignant opposition, he quietly retreated. Last week Ky found it convenient once again to show a little flexibility.

The issue was Ky's announced draft of students and professors into the Vietnamese army for officer training. The roar came from Hue, where the draft order would have reduced the local university's faculty to four professors. Meeting in a series of open "seminars," a sort of Asiatic teach-in, 500 draft eligibles issued a fiery manifesto accusing Ky of attempting to "lead the society into a state of confusion and darkness," demanded the overthrow of the government, free elections and, for good measure, "social revolution."

By themselves the Hue intellectuals are a small voice in Viet Nam, but 14 labor leaders sat in on their seminars, and the tone of their manifesto was strangely reminiscent of Thich Tri Quang, leader of Viet Nam's militant Buddhist mobs, who by coincidence was in Hue for a rally of his own. Taking no chances, Ky softened the draft. The army would exempt intellectuals holding "important" positions, announced Defense Minister Nguyen Huu Co, and would give many others only a quick training course and return them to their desks--in uniform.

Still unsatisfied, Hue's big-men-on-campus called a mass meeting in a downtown cinema, attacked the milder draft law as a government conspiracy to "regiment" the intellectuals. They also sent a delegation to line up the students at the University of Saigon. Saigon would not line up. One reason: the city seems tired of marches, demonstrations and coups. Another is that many students who might otherwise be plotting to issue manifestoes are busy with more wholesome activities.

Building Privies. Since June, 9,000 students from Saigon's high schools and university have been hard at work for the first time in their lives. All volunteers, they are the first members of a "Summer Youth Program" sponsored by Saigon's Catholic, Buddhist and other educational organizations, and modeled after the U.S. Peace Corps. With sleeves rolled up and sweat rolling down, the students are building privies, schools and roads in 18 Vietnamese provinces.

Beneath his flexibility, Ky was prepared for trouble. Bypassing the national police, who last year proved unable to control student demonstrations in Saigon, he ordered the Military Security Service to keep close watch over all potential troublemakers. Commanded by Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a hard-drinking northerner who was Ky's deputy as Air Force chief, the military cops can be counted on to be tough--and loyal. "Let them demonstrate, Buddhists, Catholics or anyone else," Ky is reported to have told an aide last week. "I have been waiting for a chance to clobber them."

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