UC Berkeley ROTC Coverage
- 28 October 2002 San Francisco Chronicle article "Cal's
ROTC program is on the rise: Students in uniform feel more at home".
- 16 March 2007 film "Indoctrinate-U". Note: According to the film maker Evan Coyne Maloney, "about 5 minutes or so in the film" is material dealing with ROTC "near the end of the film. A number of people have told us they feel it is the most infuriating footage in the film." "The segment discusses both ROTC and military recruiters on campus, and the various efforts to bar them from campus. We have footage from San Francisco State, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia and Hobart. U.C. Santa Cruz, Yale.... We get right inside the protests themselves, some of which were quite nasty. All of this is discussed in the context of what sorts of views are welcome on campus (Ward Churchill, for example) and what is not (quite literally, the American flag, which was actually removed from a number of campuses immediately following the September 11th attacks). It packs quite an emotionally powerful punch."
- 15 January 2008 SFGate Politics Blog item "Live
Blogging Dem Debate: How They Lost the Berkeley Vote". Note:
"Interesting question: Would you enforce a law that requires colleges to
have an ROTC program and allow military recruiters on campus? This is a BIG
deal in the Bay Area -- at least in the Berkeley/San Francisco/Oakland/Santa
Cruz parts of it -- where "counter-recruting" efforts goes on campus and
high school students and families regularly elect to NOT be contacted by
recruiters. Start painting the picket signs: All three of them said
they will enforce the law."
- 16 January 2008 Wall Street Journal Best of the Web Today item "Too
Patriotic for Berkeley" by James Taranto. Note:
Taranto notes how the opposition to ROTC at Berkeley puts it outside the
mainstream defined by all the Democratic presidential candidates.
- 7 November 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed "Obama Needs a Strong Foreign Policy" by Will Marshall. Note: The president of the Progressive Policy Institute gives advice to the president-elect: "At a Sept. 11 summit on national service at Columbia University, Mr. Obama chided his alma mater for barring ROTC from campus during the Vietnam War. As America's next commander in chief, Mr. Obama should take that message to other elite universities, and to places like the Marine Recruiting office in Berkeley, Calif., whose mayor, Tom Bates, earlier this year called the Marines an "uninvited and unwelcome guest." Such gestures would go a long way toward allaying suspicions that the Democratic Party harbors anti-military attitudes."
- 31 December 2010 P.O.W. in the People's Republic of California blog post "Colman McCarthy admits DADT red herring". Note: A military officer with a PhD who was an assistant professor of Military Science at a top public college describes the situation for course credit at the university. Many courses got university credit, but for the military history course, which he describes as being "as rigorous as any history course at any university ... The History department refused to allow course credit toward their major for our Military History course."
- 1 June 2011 Los Angeles Times article "Once a campus outcast, ROTC is booming at universities". Note: At the University of California at Berkeley, "Don Johnson, a rhetoric major from Oakland who is soon to become an Army second lieutenant, said off-campus antiwar activists have hassled him when he's worn his ROTC uniform. But no student ever bothered him."
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