ROTC Renaissance
ROTC Renaissance
Banned for over thirty years from elite college campuses across the country, the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) is ready for a comeback.
An Ivy League example: ROTC has been banned on Columbia’s campus since the late sixties, when the school’s trustees, following Harvard’s lead, shut out recruiters and ROTC offices from institutional property. Sparked by growing unrest over the Vietnam War, the ban was meant to signal disapproval of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. In retrospect, the ban was little more than a cynical maneuver meant to placate angry activists, whose anti-government fury sparked a wave of protests on college campuses across America throughout the 1960s. In many of these cases, anti-American furor was specifically directed at ROTC programs.
But anti-war activists misjudged ROTC. During the sixties, the Corps was a haven for draft dodgers and others who sought to avoid grunt work on the front lines by studying and training at home. Even such luminaries as Bill Clinton abused the ROTC protocols to escape the draft. What’s more, the ban on ROTC unintentionally hurt more than it helped. By stigmatizing ROTC and making it difficult for cadets to train on campus, elite universities like Harvard and Columbia discouraged prospective students from applying for ROTC scholarships. Many students would have been otherwise unable to attend an Ivy-League university without the help of such scholarships. The Trustees of Columbia and other elite schools were effectively closing avenues of financial aid that would have enabled the neediest students to purse a college education. While the universities continued to feed off government grants and subsidies, they sacrificed an important scholarship program in order to appease campus radicals.
The arguments for returning ROTC to campus far outweigh those against. Simply put, ROTC remains the best scholarship program in the country, with the potential to fully fund tuition costs at a major American university for up to four years.
ROTC also provides critical career training to its cadets, stressing technology, leadership, and motivation in the work place. Anyone who has military experience knows that the skills they learned in the service can be applied to most other job situations. ROTC is unquestionably a resume builder, as prospective employers know that former cadets are proficient, motivated, and committed individuals.
Moreover, ROTC presence on campus would allow students to learn about the men and women who put their lives at risk for the United States. Since the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies, college students have been subjected to one-sided lectures on the racism, sexism, class-ism, age-ism, able-ism, and every other “ism” endemic to Western society. Now those same students are called upon to defend the very civilization they have spent their lives denigrating. With an active ROTC presence on campus, students could get to know our soldiers better, which could result in easing campus tensions between pro and anti-war activists. At the very least, a campus committed to openly providing opportunities for ROTC cadets would also be promoting American culture and its core values of honor, loyalty, honesty, and virtue.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, changing attitudes towards the military’s role in society gave birth to a pro-ROTC movement that seeks to re-instate the program at schools like Harvard University. Shortly after the attacks, a group composed of Harvard alumni and students organized a petition and letter campaign spearheaded by former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Articles supporting ROTC have appeared in numerous on-campus and off campus publications, from the Harvard Crimson to the Wall Street Journal.
This outpouring of support has changed the climate of opinion amongst Harvard’s administrators. Harvard President and former Clinton Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers has suggested he might be open to changing Harvard’s policy towards ROTC. According to Summers, universities should “be careful about adopting any policy on campus of non-support for those involved in defending the country.” He then later expressed his “support” for Harvard’s cadets. In an important speech at the Kennedy School of Government, Summers promoted a search for a “reconciliation of values” between diversity and patriotism.
With the Harvard movement gaining steam and spreading to other campuses like Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia, a day when ROTC cadets can once again train proudly on green Ivy lawns is now possible. But until then, administrators and students alike will have to face the sad fact that a ban on ROTC is simply rotten.