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December 18, 2004
ROTC Strikes Back
We hear a lot of blather from folks like Charles Rangel about how America's elite are underrespresented in our armed forces.
There's a good reason for that: America's elite universities steadfastly refuse to allow ROTC programs or recruiters on their campuses. Our courts recently decided universities may legally discriminate against military recruiters: universities don't have to allow them the same access they allow other employers.
In the vernacular of 21st century jurisprudence, discrimination is free speech. That preventing the nation's largest and most successful equal-opportunity employer from recruiting among the nation's elite puts the burden of defending the nation on the middle and lower classes is indeed unfortunate. But look on the bright side: at least all those VietNam-era syllabi won't need to be revised. No need to mention that the faculty themselves are contributing to this imbalace: students don't need to know everything.
John Hechinger reports that DOD is showing signs of fighting back:
Lt. Vincent Tuohey has led a platoon of 30 soldiers patrolling the deadly road to Baghdad's airport. He has dodged bombs, grenades and gunfire. No one doubts his bravery, but he still gets strange looks when he relaxes in the barracks wearing his college T-shirt. "You went to Harvard?" a soldier once asked. "Why did you join the Army?"
Lt. Tuohey, 25 years old and stationed in Baghdad, is part of a rare breed: the Ivy League-educated officer. In the 1960s and 1970s, Brown, Columbia, Harvard and Yale banished the military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps from their campuses amid Vietnam War protests. But earlier generations of students drilled at these schools, and a Harvard lieutenant would not have seemed out of place on the battlefield.
In recent weeks, the Defense Department has privately asked top brass at the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines whether they are interested in opening a small ROTC outpost at Harvard. For decades students at Harvard who join ROTC, including Lt. Tuohey, have trained at the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
In a letter that is about to be sent to Harvard alumni, Lt. Col. Brian Baker, the commander of the ROTC Army battalion at MIT, says he plans to meet with Harvard President Lawrence Summers in the spring to lobby for a Harvard beachhead. "Our nation needs a cross section of America represented in its officer corps," he writes, adding that he wants to double the number of Harvard cadets to 100.
Harvard's president has been walking a fine line: supporting ROTC when talking to them, but backing away from open support when speaking before groups hostile to the military. He, like other college presidents who have been far less supportive of the ROTC, are going to be flushed out into the open by the DOD's strategy.
It's about time this issue was brought out into the open. I have a feeling most parents at these institutions are largely clueless and would be shocked (and angry) at the attitude of the faculty and administration.
Posted by Cassandra at December 18, 2004 07:31 AM
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Comments
There are better private liberal arts schools in the Midwest that teach real curriculum and don't live off the prestige of their old graduates that would welcome the ROTC.
Posted by: KJ at December 18, 2004 09:00 AM