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. Read more »