National ROTC Coverage: 2011

1 January 2011 New York Post editorial "Time for ROTC's return". Note: The Post calls on Columbia University president Lee Bollinger to make moves as pro-ROTC as those by his counterparts at Harvard and Yale.
2 January 2011 New York Daily News editorial "Columbia and other Ivy League campuses must reopen their gates to ROTC". Note: "Individual students can, consistent with their conscience, be anti-war, ambivalent or eager to serve. But the institution has a responsibility to expose its students, many of whom are privileged, to the opportunity to serve their country."
3 January 2011 American Spectator article "Let's Ban Ivy League ROTC" by Jed Babbin. Note: Babbin, a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, urges young people not to go to Ivy League colleges: "graduate without having your nose so stuck in the air that you believe America isn't a force for good in the world". He also urges the military to avoid Ivy League colleges. In reality, however, there are over 300 veterans as undergraduates at Columbia University, and smaller numbers at other top colleges.
3 January 2011 Secure Nation item "Blueprint for Columbia ROTC" by Eric Chen. Note: Chen, one of the leaders of the 2005 ROTC effort at Columbia, outlines how Columbia's strengths, including a large undergraduate military veteran population and a strong engineering school, argue for creating an ROTC+ program at Columbia to be "the leading, state-of-the-art ROTC program in the nation".
4 January 2011 The Atlantic bog item "ROTC and Columbia: the Jack Wheeler Legacy" by James Fallows. Note: Noting the "blueprint" articles for Harvard and Columbia ROTC, Fallows observes, "Part of the reason a blueprint is necessary: resinstatement would involve significant complications and headaches on the military's side, not just for the universities, so it shouldn't be done in a slapdash way. Worth reading, along with Wheeler's own impassioned statement on the subject last spring. And worth acting on."
4 January 2011 National Review column "The Importance of ROTC in the Ivy League" by David French. Note: "Many of my own Harvard Law School classmates, some of the brightest people I’ve ever known, are shockingly ignorant of military matters. With more cadets on campus, that ignorance gap will close, and our future leaders in government, business, and entertainment will hopefully be a bit wiser and — who knows — even more willing to join themselves."
5 January 2011 Daily Princetonian article "Policy on ROTC unchanged after repeal of don't ask, don't tell". Note: Princeton President Shirley Tilghman said "The only change I anticipate is the opportunity for gay students to join ROTC".
5 January 2011 Stanford Daily article "‘Don’t ask’ repeal jumpstarts ROTC debate". Note: Some in the "left-leaning community" at Stanford favor welcoming ROTC now that DADT is repealed, but others "are concerned that transgender people are still excluded from service according the Uniform Code of Military Justice". See letter on 6 January.
6 January 2011 Stanford Daily letter "With DADT gone, plenty of objections to ROTC remain" by Danny Colligan. Note: The President emeritus of "Stanford Says No to War" quotes a 1969 document to demonstrate that opposition to ROTC at that time was not based on the 1993 "Don't ask, don't tell" law. He lists academic freedom, transgender rights and anti-military reasons for opposing ROTC at Stanford.
7 January 2011 Weekly Standard blog post "Do Ask, Do Tell: Insist universities explain their opposition to ROTC" by Cheryl Miller. Note: commenting on Princeton's unwillingness to consider enhancements to its relationship with ROTC, Miller asks "If learning how to manage a classroom is intellectually challenging enough to be worthy of credit at Princeton, why isn’t learning to manage a platoon?"
9 January 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education article "After Repeal of 'Don't Ask,' Elite Colleges Rethink ROTC". Note: The article discusses ways in which top colleges could provide the military with crucial skills, due to the diversity on their campuses and their ability to provide an ROTC+ experience, leveraging the expertise of their non-military faculty. See letter on 30 January.
9 January 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education commentary "'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and ROTC's Future at Elite Colleges" by Donald Alexander Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili. Note: "After decades of promoting the benefits of diversity, colleges are now recognizing the contributions that military experience can make to the diversity of the intellectual and moral climate. As Peter Awn, dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, told us in an interview, "There isn't hostility toward them because they represent the military. So it's a very, very different climate. And more often than not, the traditional students find them really interesting."" The authors note that "The same argument applies to ROTC, and we believe that many colleges will seriously consider bringing the program back. Basic civic equality called for the end of "don't ask, don't tell." It also calls for the Ivies to participate more meaningfully in the Reserve Officer Training Corps."
9 January 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Objecting to ROTC on anti-discrimination grounds". The item discusses the anti-ROTC site set up by a student group at rotc.stanford.edu, and notes their opposition to ROTC because of discrimination against transgender people. After positing that some level of discrimination will likely be present in the military (though not using a compelling example such as medical disabilities), it asks whether the anti-ROTC group is "absolutely opposed to ROTC" or sees "some acceptable level of military discrimination where it would be a net benefit for Stanford to have ROTC?" (The rotc.stanford.edu subdomain was revoked on 11 January.)
10 January 2011 Yale Daily News article "ROTC may return to Yale". Note: "“I’m very hopeful that we can work out arrangements with the military that are satisfactory to our community and we’ll be able to bring ROTC back to campus,” University President Richard Levin said in a Sunday interview. Levin spoke with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week to express interest in the military setting up a new ROTC unit at Yale. Yale College Dean Mary Miller said Levin has since had a “positive” follow-up conversation with a senior military official... “The curriculum is based on the military’s standard operating procedure,” said James Campbell ’13, who heads the Yale College Council ROTC Committee. “Maybe there are ways Yale could build on the standard operating procedures to make it into a more intellectualized and challenging program that fits into the Yale curriculum.”"
10 January 2011 The Guardian (UCSD) op-ed "This Unit’s Out of Line" by Allison Gauss. Note: The author argues that many universities effectively barred ROTC in the late 1960s because of concern about academic standards (see here for wider background), and that universities should refuse to consider ROTC unless the Solomon Amendment is repealed. The author also suggests that the current wars are a reason for not having ROTC.
10 January 2011 David Clayman '38, 1917-2011. Note: The life of the founder of Advocates for Harvard ROTC is recounted.
11 January 2011 National Public Radio "Talk of the Nation" segment "ROTC May Return To Ivy League Campuses" with Alvin Felzenberg. Note: A presidential historian deplores the civil-military divide and calls for the return of ROTC to top colleges: "I don't want to live in a society, frankly, where we have one class that sends other people's children to war and kind of sneers at them socially in some ways, and another class that sees itself as a Praetorian Guard, knowing better what's in the interest of the civilian sector than the people, perhaps, at the top that they may or may not respect." Speaking of the importance of having ROTC students on campus he said "I want to say that some of the ROTC students in my class have been among the best. And I've also called on them, also, to add to my lectures because they do learn about military history, a field that's been, unfortunately, neglected at some universities. They know about strategy. They know the difference between tactics and strategy. They know about generalship: good generalship, bad generalship. I actually called up one of them to help me - when I was teaching about Lincoln and Grant and their strategy of the Civil War. These kids know their stuff and they're very eloquent at it. And we need them."
12 January 2011 Stanford Daily article "Students discuss discrimination, military-civilian divide at ROTC town hall". Note: Alok Vaid-Menon ‘13, president of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation argued that ROTC on campus would still violate Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy by prohibiting transgender students from participating. Sam Windley, a law student and president of Stanford Says No to War, said that ROTC defies the right to free academic exploration.
12 January 2011 Bay Citizen article "Stanford Debates Return of ROTC". Note: The Stanford University Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC held its first public meeting. Opponents of allowing on-campus ROTC courses "included graduate student Sam Windley, who argued that ROTC’s ability to restrict its members to certain majors contradicted Stanford’s liberal educational approach. “If they want to come to Stanford, then Stanford should offer them the Stanford experience,” Windley said. “And the Stanford experience, as the undergraduate program is designed, is to expose students to all the possibilities that they want to pursue academically.”" Except, in his view, ROTC. "Jim Wilson, a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an Army ROTC instructor, noted that in many ways, ROTC was already at Stanford because military programs use rooms at the University to teach some first- and second-year educational components of ROTC to its members... “At the end of the day, I felt that most of the arguments that were presented against bringing back ROTC to Stanford were legitimate reasons for an individual not to choose ROTC," he said, "but not compelling enough to not allow the program on the campus.”"
12 January 2011 Stanford University News article "Committee 'schooled' on ROTC, seeking more input from faculty and staff ". Note: "Stanford began hosting classes by Santa Clara University's Army ROTC program in 1997. Currently, six Army ROTC classes for freshmen and sophomores are held on the Stanford campus. The classes focus on leadership, including "Leadership and Personal Development" and "Leadership in Changing Environments.""
14 January 2011 Stanford Daily article "Faculty discuss academic merit of ROTC classes". Note: The Stanford University Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC met with faculty, and reported that it had studied MIT's ROTC arrangements in detail as a model for what may work at Stanford.
14 January 2011 Stanford Daily letter "ROTC lends the military a critical mix" by Dean Holman. Note: A Stanford ROTC alumnus writes that the absence of ROTC "would tend to change the character of the officer corps from reflecting the input of the citizen-solder to a solely professional officer corps" and that former Stanford president Kenneth Pitzer had agreed with this concern.
14 January 2011 Stanford University News article "Community forum raises new issues for Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC to contemplate". Note: Todd Davies, an academic research and program officer in the Symbolic Systems Program opposed ROTC since "ROTC students were required to make decisions about their future – that they would join the military as soon as they graduated from college – before they were mature enough to understand the array of choices available to them."
17 January 2011 Columbia Spectator column "Reevaluating ROTC: By banning ROTC, we're alienating ourselves from the realities of war" by Nick Bloom. Note: Bloom writes that "apathy toward the military in one of the nation’s most elite universities is perhaps the single most dangerous and irresponsible attitude that the Columbia community could take toward matters of war" and it "creates a massive class divide, desensitizing the people who will most likely be calling the shots in political matters in future decades from the realities of war—which legitimizes claims that elite universities are out of touch with mainstream America."
18 January 2011 Stanford Daily article "Stanford Says No to War loses ROTC subdomain". Note: Stanford inadvertently allowed an antiwar group to use the subdomain http://rotc.stanford.edu, but revoked the assignment because it was misleading.
18 January 2011 Stanford Daily letter "ROTC as a civil rights issue" by Sam Windley LL.M. ‘11. Note: The president of "Stanford Says No to War" writes to say that it was "disgusting" for ROTC supporters to argue that allowing ROTC is a civil rights issue and use terms such as “separate but equal”, “busing”, “minority” and “safe space on campus”. He argues that “Military-connectedness” should not be covered by the university's antidiscrimination policy.
18 January 2010 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Domain Names and War Games (or at Least Talk About ROTC)". Note: In the comments, one poster quotes from Stanford's nondiscrimination policy, which refers to "its obligations under the law" and "protected by applicable law" to argue that Stanford's policy should not be seen as being in disagreement with relevant laws since it draws its authority from those laws.
19 January 2011 Silicon Valley Mercury News article "Stanford ponders the return of ROTC after nearly four decades". Note: History professor Bart Bernstein said "Students in ROTC courses are not as intellectually free as they are in Stanford courses -- for instance, they are not allowed to criticize the president of the U.S., foreign policy and military action." However, ROTC graduate Sean Wilkes points out that Bernstein is wrong: ROTC students and students at service academies are not supposed to criticize the political or military leadership in public in uniform, but they may do so when out of uniform or in an academic setting such as a class.
20 January 2011 Columbia Spectator article "USenate to hold town halls on ROTC, vote expected in April". Note: The task force will do a survey of all schools that had ROTC students in the past 5 years and collect information for a report to the Senate in March but will not make a recommendation. A vote in favor of ROTC would mean that the university would approach the military asking for an ROTC program.
20 January 2011 PolicyMic blog item "After DADT, Should Colleges Welcome Back ROTC?" by Peter Bonilla. Note: A Program Officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education lists several reasons to oppose ROTC, including the issue of possible course credits, cost, opposition to war, and several reasons to support ROTC, including free choice, diversity and financial incentives.
20 January 2011 PolicyMic blog item "ROTC, DADT, and Continued Discrimination Against Transgender Individuals" by Alok Vaid-Menon. Note: The president of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation notes that "Various military bureaucratic processes including DD-215 forms in the military, the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service do not contain provisions to specify changes in gender identity (from male to female or vice versa). Furthermore, numerous Veteran's Affairs medical services including prostate exams, pap smears, and mammograms are routinely denied to transgender veterans". He notes that "A re-introduction of ROTC, therefore, still constitutes a violation of non-discrimination clauses that protect against discrimination on the basis of gender identity" and reports that "Stanford Students for Queer Liberation and Harvard Transgender Task Force have begun to work on this campaign on our respective campuses." He writes "I recognize that this is not an easy decision to make, but we feel working against such open injustices is essential to upholding our mutual investment in equal opportunity". He doesn't address the issue of whether other violations of university nondiscrimination clauses are acceptable, such as those protecting people with physical disabilities.
21 Jaunary 2011 National Marriage Boycott news release "Stanford students fight ROTC's return based on trans bias". Note: "Several student organizations have launched a new campaign against the return of ROTC to college campuses in light of the repeal of DADT due to their policy of discrimination towards transgender service members."
22 January 2011 Yale Herald blog post "After DADT, questions remain for ROTC" by Emma Schindler. Note: The Yale LGBTQ Co-op notes that “as part of its medical examinations, the Armed Forces rejects candidates who have had gender-affirming surgery (also known as sex reassignment surgery)... the military strictly regulates uniform and grooming standards by gender. Even if a servicemember is following the medical advice of a doctor before undergoing further transition care, ‘cross-dressing’ or perceived ‘cross-dressing’ can still be grounds for discipline, discharge, or criminal prosecution.” The group notes that “While we are thrilled at the prospect of the repeal of DADT ... we believe that the policies of the United States Armed Forces remain incompatible with Yale’s stated policy of non-discrimination with regard to gender identity and expression” because of exclusion of transgender people. It is not clear whether the Yale LGBTQ Co-op expressed concern about other differences with Yale's nondiscrimination statement, such as exclusion of people with physical disabilities from the military. The article also claims that Yale has not been sanctioned under the Solomon amendment because "the ban on ROTC is de facto and not official". That is false. The Solomon Amendment applies to a college that "either prohibits, or in effect prevents" ROTC. The Solomon Amendment has not been applied to Yale because the law can only be invoked by the Secretary of Defense, and although it has been invoked and upheld for military recruiting, it hasn't been invoked or tested in the courts for ROTC.
22 January 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog post "ROTC: What to Expect This Semester". Note: The University Senate's ROTC taskforce "is launching a website soon, and organizing three successive town halls in February, in venues that can accommodate over 400 people ... senior administrators including Dean Moody-Adams and Provost Steele have expressed “very very strong interest” in being a part of the meetings. There will again be a student poll, open to all the undergraduate schools, and SIPA... The task force is actively soliciting community members opinions via rotc-taskforce@columbia.edu."
23 January 2011 Columbia Spectator column "DADT was a blessing in disguise: The DADT repeal may help the military, but it only hurts humans" by Yasmeen Ar-Rayani . Note: "Now is the time for our community to consider how shallow our rejection of ROTC was. As anti-racist youth, we ought to focus, not on fighting inequality within the military, but on fighting a military whose very purpose it is to perpetuate inequality the world over."
24 January 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Columbia and ROTC: A lost generation: By banning ROTC, Columbia loses the opportunity the provide the nation with the next generation of military leaders" by Michael Christman. Note: An alumnus and captain in the United States Marine Corps writes "Many at Columbia still view military service as beneath them—for someone who doesn’t have any other options or can’t think on his own. This could not be further from the truth. As long as this attitude persists and our nation’s elite continue to shun military service, Columbia’s influence on many of the world’s important foreign policy questions will be restricted to campus lecture halls."
24 January 2011 Silicon Valley Mercury News op-ed "ROTC policy on Wikileaks threatens academic freedom" by Stephen Zunes. Note: A professor at the University of San Francisco describes a memo received by ROTC programs saying that the ban on federal employees accessing the WikiLeaks web site applies to ROTC students as well. Prof. Zunes argues that professors have a right to require students to access the WikiLeaks site, even though the federal government considers it to be involvement in a crime for anyone to access the site. Zunes speculates that next, federal employees could be prohibited from "reading material critical of U.S. military actions in Iraq or Vietnam".
25 Jaunary 2011 Cornell Daily Sun article "Ivies Reconsider ROTC After 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repealed". Note: Lt. Colonel Stephen Alexander, professor of military science and head of the Cornell Army ROTC program said “Support for LGBT kids [in ROTC] needs to be developed over time. It’s breaking out over time and we need to develop new policies ...We’re down here waiting for the [DADT] implementation plan that’s supposed to come out in February.”
25 January 2011 Stanford Daily letter "ROTC: Lift the ban, but don’t hold your breath" by Tristan Abbey ‘08. Note: The writer expresses concern that Stanford will students interested in military service to wait until after graduation and enroll in Officer Candidate School.
25 January 2011 State of the Union speech by President Barack Obama. Note: Obama said "Our troops come from every corner of this country – they are black, white, Latino, Asian and Native American. They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay. Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love. And with that change, I call on all of our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation."
26 January 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Obama Champions ROTC Return". Note: "His voice will likely bring with it the support of many more Democrats, if they weren’t already in support of ROTC."
26 January 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Obama: Time for ROTC to Return". Note: Echoing President Obama's call for colleges to open their doors to ROTC, Harvard lecturer and former Clinton administration official Elaine C. Kamarck said “There is nothing more symbolically important than Harvard getting ROTC back ... The preeminent university in the country should have ROTC.”
26 January 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Committee to consider ROTC’s return". Note: President Ruth Simmons convened a committee chaired by Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron "to make recommendations on the future of military education and recruitment on campus". The committee "will serve as a way to gauge the feelings of the Brown community and will issue a recommendation on the reinstatement of ROTC".
26 January 2011 Daily Pennsylvanian article "Transgender concerns enter ROTC debate". Note: Leaders of the LGBT community at Penn said that the military presence on Penn’s campus does not detract from the strength of the LGBT community and instead it ensures that the discussion regarding transgender equality in the military will continue. "“There was no logical reason to keep gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from serving,” [vice chair of Finance and Development for the Lambda Alliance Hugh] Hamilton wrote. However, he added that there could be reasons to prevent individuals who are in the process of transitioning from one gender to another from serving in the armed forces.“Someone undergoing their transition is under enormous physical stress from hormone therapy as well as reconstructive surgery,” Hamilton wrote. Transitioning requires a psychologically supportive environment which certainly does not exist in wartime.”"
26 January 2011 Stanford Daily article "ROTC debate comes to Undergraduate Senate". Note: Both Profs. Ewart Thomas, chairman of the ad hoc committee on ROTC and Hester Gelber, a member of the committee raised the question of students planning to work in the military or the State Department being discouraged from accessing classified documents on the WikiLeaks site.
26 January 2011 Bay citizen article "Revelation of ROTC Classes on Stanford Campus Casts Debate in New Light". Note: "According to a university press release published this month ... administrators have allowed informal ROTC classes to take place in Stanford facilities since 1997. Stanford’s registrar didn’t begin explicitly listing the classes as on-campus activities in the official university class catalog until the 2002-2003 academic year."
26 January 2011 NPR opinion article "ROTC And The Ivy League: A Feud Worth Fixing" by Ken Harbaugh. Note: A former Navy pilot writes "The real challenge to re-introducing ROTC at places like Yale will be getting the armed services to take advantage of the opportunity... If the services won't step up on their own, the president can make them. Perhaps he would have done better Tuesday speaking not to our colleges as president, but to our military as commander in chief."
26 January 2011 Center for a New American Security blog post "A Word About Last Night's State of the Union Address" by Andrew Exum. Note: The author, a Penn ROTC graduate, discusses the interplay between the scarcity of ROTC programs at top colleges and the low numbers of sutdents there who do ROTC.
26 January 2011 Huffington Post column "Just Say No to ROTC On College Campuses" by Joe Mirabella. Note: "Colleges and universities should focus all their energy on preserving the lives of their students, and students throughout the world. They should be harbors of peace, not war... For those schools who do follow the President's request, they should require all ROTC recruiters to be accompanied by someone who is expert on other choices."
26 January 2011 National Public Radio story "Reinstating ROTC Programs May Not Be So Simple". Note: Colonel Ray Pettit of U.S. Army Cadet Command in Virginia said "One of the downsides with respect to getting the leadership from Ivy League schools is that generally, those students will perform their required service to the Army and tend to get out of the Army at a higher rate than non-Ivy League students do."
27 January 2011 New York Times article "Despite Obama’s Call, No Rush in R.O.T.C.’s Return to Campus". Note: The day after President Obama's State of the Union comments about ROTC, Cynthia Smith, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, said “New schools or universities interested in R.O.T.C. programs will each be evaluated” with an eye toward “the most efficient use of these resources”. Also, "As the universities now move toward recognizing R.O.T.C. programs, they still may hit a snag. Some students are arguing that even with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military still does not meet the antidiscrimination requirements of the universities because it bars people who are transgender. At Stanford, Alok Vaid-Menon, a sophomore and president of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, said his group wanted to keep R.O.T.C. off the campus, though still allow students to participate in programs at nearby campuses, until the military accepted transgender students. He said that he had tried to raise support for this view from students at other universities but that the response so far had been “bleak.”"
27 January 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Where Do We Stand Now? Eight panelists sit down to discuss ROTC's role at Columbia". Note: Liya Yu, a PhD student in political science said "Columbia in the past years has been remarkably internationalized. How does this international outlook actually fit with ROTC, a very national institution?" In response to a comment by Prof. Herbert Gans that "“the best and the brightest” of Harvard brought us into the Vietnam War", Jose Robledo, an undergraduate ROTC student who served 9 years in the Army, pointed out that the "best and brightest" were policy makers. "These [ROTC men and women] that are graduating every May and every December from America’s universities [are] actually implementing those some of those hard truths—they have to be out there."
27 January 2011 Weekly Standard blog post "Cheap Talk? How serious is Obama about ROTC on elite campuses?" by Cheryl Miller. Note: "If President Obama (and Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen) is serious about restoring ROTC's geographic and cultural balance, he will have to be willing to advocate for -- and authorize -- the necessary resources. Otherwise, President Obama's support will be nothing more than cheap talk."
27 January 2011 Ground Report blog post "Obama's 13526 Mistake: ROTC Censorship" by Dean Walker. Note: An environmental and human rights activist spoke to a U.S. Army Cadet Command public affairs officer and says he was told that ROTC students are under the same set of orders as regular military personal in regards to accessing the WikiLeaks site.
27 January 2011 Extra Credit blog item "ROTC's Response to WikiLeaks Puts Academic Freedom at Risk" by Kevin Gosztola. Note: The "concerned" reaction of the head of the Stanford Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC to an op-ed about WikiLeaks was after the head of an anti-war group had just showed him the article.
28 January 2011 Washington Post op-ed "Don't expand ROTC. Replace it." by John Lehman and Richard H. Kohn. Note: A former secretary of the navy and a professor of military history suggest reversing the "near-elimination of Officer Candidate School billets for those without prior enlisted service" instead of expanding ROTC because "faculties are likely to be unenthusiastic".
28 January 2011 Harvard Crimson op-ed "Continued Discrimination in ROTC" by Samuel Bakkila and Jia Hui Lee. Note: The authors, members of "Harvard Queer Students and Allies", argue that ROTC should be excluded from Harvard until transgender people can serve openly in the military.
28 January 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "The ROTC Question" by Chris Norris-LeBlanc '13. Note: The writer notes that a "2003 survey of female veterans showed that 30 percent were victims of sexual assault while serving in various branches of the military" and argues for discouraging Brown students from entering the military.
28 January 2011 Enterprise blog (AEI) item "Columbia University’s ROTC Debate" by Cheryl Miller. Note: Miller stresses the importance of having officers who can implement policy wisely.
28 January 2011 Columbia University Senate: Task Force on Military Engagement. Note: The committee considering the ROTC issue launched its web site, detailing the process by which they will explore the issue, with a first hearing on 7 February. The site also has a summary of the history of the ROTC issue at Columbia and links to some key documents.
28 January 2011 Kerplunk blog item "On ROTC in the Ivy League" by Matt Gallagher. Note: Gallagher writes "given the lessons supposedly learned in our officer corps from the past eight years at war, shouldn't we be seeking out as many of the best and brightest as possible, even if they are just four-year short-timers? Does the military want to produce another generation of officers just like the old one, or do they want to develop and cultivate the best officer corps it possibly can? ... The Ivy League shouldn't just be a farm for future Spooks, especially if the military is serious about developing leaders capable of leading both in traditional warfare and in asymmetric warfare."
31 January 2011 Harvard Crimson editorial "The Return of ROTC: It is time for Harvard to spearhead a rapprochement with America’s military". Note: "Just as DADT represented an outdated prejudice directed toward gay American citizens, the absence of ROTC now stands as a relic of an outdated bias against the American armed forces... We welcome the perspective of the military to Harvard’s marketplace of ideas, and believe that there can be no better context for an ROTC education than within Harvard’s curriculum and values... We remind those who would oppose this move that President Faust and other Harvard administrators have repeatedly predicated the return of ROTC upon the repeal of DADT. Thus, should the university backtrack on its public commitment, its political credibility will be greatly impaired, as will Harvard’s ability to influence future legislation with similar pronouncements... While we remain concerned about the continued exclusion of transgendered and intersex individuals from military service, we do not feel that this is sufficient justification for singling out the military for campus opprobrium. Furthermore, as such objections to ROTC only emerged in the public discourse after the repeal of DADT, to base rejection of ROTC on them now would be disingenuous and erode the credibility of Harvard as a good faith actor in this debate." See letters here and here.
31 January 2011 Harvard Crimson video "Roving Reporter: ROTC". Note: The Crimson interviews Harvard students about ROTC, and the sentiment is overwhelmingly in favor of welcoming it to campus.
31 January 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "The ROTC answer" by Heath Mayo '13. Note: Mayo writes that "the contention that opponents use to attack the proposal, which suggests that an ROTC program runs counter to campus culture, seems to contradict the sacred concept of diversity that Brown routinely heralds. Just as any conservative Protestant should respect groups on campus that promote lifestyles that run counter to her faith, so should an anti-war student be expected to respect her peers who wish to serve the military. By this analysis, the only choice that is consistent with Brown's culture and celebration of diversity is to allow students who wish to serve our country the opportunity to do so."
31 January 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Operationalizing ROTC’s Return" by Otis Reid. Note: Reid considers how ROTC might return to campus if it were allowed to return.
31 January 2011 Stanford Review editorial "No Excuses Left for ROTC’s Ban". Note: "If they really wanted to free transgender individuals from military discrimination, they’d want as many Stanford student leaders in the military as possible."
31 January 2011 Stanford Review article "The Left Divided on ROTC". Note: Stanford Democrats has remained neutral on return of ROTC to Stanford, and some who remain opposed to ROTC after DADT repeal said they don't see Stanford Democrats as "a party of the Left".
February 2010 Air Force Magazine "Replanting ROTC". Note: The article cites a 1989 Harvard Crimson editorial opposing ROTC ever returning, a reference made moot by a 31 January 2011 Harvard Crimson editorial supporting return of ROTC. The article goes on to describe how the military and top universities will both benefit from ROTC on campus.
February 2011 Center for a New American Security report "Keeping The Edge: Revitalizing America’s Military Officer Corps". Note: The report proposes adding extra capabilities to the education of officers to deal with deployments with many cultural complexities.
1 February 2011 Stanford Daily article "NMB petitions potential ROTC return". Note: A LGBT group is opposing ROTC as long as transgender people can't serve openly in the military. One of its leaders said “If Harvard, Columbia, Stanford were to make a decision not to return ROTC to campus on the basis of transgender exclusion, the sheer cultural capital of that would help effectively prove to the military that it needs to change”.
2 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Twenty-four apply to ROTC committee". Note: The committee will consider whether to invite ROTC to Brown. "According to a University statement, the original decision to end Air Force and Naval ROTC in 1971 and 1972, respectively, stemmed from academic concerns, such as whether the program should have its own department and whether or not its courses should carry academic credit." However, "Abbott Gleason, professor emeritus of history and slavic studies, began teaching at Brown in the fall of 1968, shortly before ROTC was banned on campus. He said that the program was wildly unpopular at the time due to student attitudes about U.S. foreign military involvements. "At almost all of what you would call liberal colleges in the United States," he said, "attitudes flung wildly against ROTC because of the Vietnam War.""
2 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "Politics and patriotism in the ROTC issue? No thanks" by Chelsea Waite '11. Note: "Perhaps if more of us actually knew about U.S. military presences the world over and had met some of the women and men making up those presences, we would be in a better position to make the changes we want to see in our foreign policy... If we, and others like us, had more of a presence in, or exposure to, the armed forces, perhaps — dare I say it? — we would do more than passively disapprove of its actions... An ROTC presence at Brown would invite, I believe, a more dynamic discussion about the U.S. military and a more nuanced perspective from those inside and outside the program."
2 February 2011 Stanford Daily article "Rice announces support for ROTC". Note: Professor Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of State and Hoover fellow George Shultz wrote “We can think of no better way to prepare future servicemen and women—many of whom will become national leaders—than by enriching them with a Stanford education.”
2 February 2011 Memorandum for the Task Force on Military Engagement by Prof. Abraham R. Wagner. Note: A Columbia faculty member with three decades of national security related government service writes that having Columbia students serve in national security related areas is crucial. "Many of the failures we have experienced in the last several years have been due to a failure to bring in well-educated young people to perform some of the most challenging analytical tasks imaginable."
3 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald editorial "Reconsidering ROTC". Note: "Provost David Kertzer, in an e-mail to the editorial page board, further noted that "in the past, the faculty have voiced concerns" about the military's requirements, like the one requiring the University to grant academic credit for ROTC classes." However, as listed here and discussed here, many ROTC programs don't offer credit that counts for graduation.
3 February 2011 Harvard Crimson article "ROTC Faces Uphill Battle". Note: Associate Professor Kevin Kit Parker, who is a Major in the active US Army Reserve and a combat veteran, said "Harvard should endeavor to have the best ROTC program as part of endeavoring to be the best university. We will draw the very best ROTC students if we have the very best program".
3 February 2011 Harvard Political Review item "Speaking Out Against ROTC" by Sandra Korn. Note: Korn writes that "perhaps it is true that, consciously or unconsciously, Americans who simply don’t want ROTC to return are focusing more on the issue of transgender rights than they were before. In fact, I admit that I might be one of them. I took the paragraph about transgender discrimination out of my November 24th Crimson article before publication, but now frequently bring the issue up in discussions about ROTC. However, I don’t see this as hypocrisy. I don’t want the military to recruit on my college campus—so why should I not use the most potent persuasive devices at my disposal to keep it away?"
4 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "When a statement becomes a policy" by Susannah Kroeber. Note: A student discusses her conversation with Professor Michael Vorenberg and lists the reasons she favors allowing ROTC at Brown.
4 February 2011 Huffington Post item "Gay Rights and University ROTC Policy" by Jonathan R. Cole. Note: A Columbia professor and former provost says that ROTC should not be allowed on campus because in the military "gay couples simply have not achieved equal protection under the law and they suffer sharp disparities from not being permitted to marry".
5 February 2011 Ground Report blog post "ROTC Comments on WikiLeaks Censorship" by Dean Walker. Note: Walker follows up on his earlier post about the WikiLeaks issue. He writes that "Professor Zunes has informed me that since publishing his editorial, he has received clarification from cadets and the ROTC. Essentially, Professor Zunes says that the U.S. Army Cadet Command has sought a more “liberal” interpretation of the policy." Walker also interviews Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Hackathorn of the Public Affairs Office of the US Army Cadet Command about who responds "Cadets/Cadre direct research or access to Wikileaks is not recommended. Research for classified information in the public domain is prohibited on unclassified government computers. Student access to such information using school computers, personal computers, smart phones, iPads, etc.,) is not prohibited, only discouraged. Cadets are not Soldiers and this guidance serves as a recommendation to safeguard the future of newly commissioned officers seeking security clearances."
6 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog post "ROTC Hearings to Begin Tomorrow". Note: The comments will be transcribed and published on the Task Force’s website.
7 February 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Activists Say Military's Policy Remains Biased". Note: Harvard Trans Task Force is circulating a petition against return of ROTC "until the military allows Americans of any sex or gender identity to enlist". However, others disagree. "Nathaniel G. Butler ’68, a Navy veteran and board member of the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, was an advocate for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. While he said that he would like to see trans-identified and intersex individuals granted the ability to serve, Butler said that their exclusion should not be a barrier for ROTC’s return to Harvard."
7 February 2011 Daily Princetonian column "Silenced soldiers" by Allen Paltrow. Note: Paltrow embellishes the WikiLeaks & ROTC controversy by changing an account of "considering using WikiLeaks material" to "increasingly using information from the leaks in their curricula and assignments".
7 February 2011 Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement hearing audio recordings and transcript. Note: The bulk of the comments fell into three groups: veterans supporting ROTC, people opposing ROTC because openly transgender people can't serve, or opposing ROTC because students train to fight.
8 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Opinions mixed at USenate's first ROTC town hall". Note: Forty people in the audience each made brief remarks, split between those pro and anti-ROTC. Several criticized the format. ROTC-supporter Learned Foote CC ’11, president of the Columbia College Student Council, said he did not like that anyone could make a claim “without it being fact-checked... I think there were a lot of things that were said that were not true, and I would hope that when the task force makes its recommendations, that they consider both the feelings that were expressed today, and also the facts”. Jose Robledo, GS, a University senator, and ROTC cadet said “For the most part, a lot of intellectual arguments that a University of this caliber is supposed to have were not had here.. A lot of those arguments [from the town hall] are regurgitations of popular rhetoric, and that was easily seen by how quickly the point-counterpoint went.”
8 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "ROTC and the tyranny of the masses" by Oliver Rosenbloom '13. Note: Rosenbloom writes that students who oppose ROTC value the tyranny of the majority higher than the individual freedom to choose to serve one's country. "Proponents of ROTC should not have to prove that it would have a beneficial impact for the entire school. Students who want to attend an elite academic institution and serve their country should have the freedom to do so, regardless of other students' political opinions."
8 February 2010 Stanford Daily article "Cardona authors advisory bill on ROTC". Note: The measure would add a question about ROTC to the Spring 2011 student election ballot; "when the decision was made to remove ROTC from campus, there was a campus wide student vote".
8 February 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Cardona Submits Bill to Include ROTC Return on Ballot" by Otis Reid. Note: Reid argues that the anti-ROTC side hasn't "gained traction with most Stanford students" and that the pro-ROTC side will win as long as most students don't ignore the advisory ballot question.
8 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ROTC Hearings, Part 1: “No Catcalls, Please”". Note: One of the objections cited to having ROTC at Columbia is that "The military recruits among low-income areas specifically".
8 February 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Stanford’s ROTC Committee is Sleeping on the Job" by Autumn Carter. Note: Assessing Stanford's Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC, Carter writes "The committee has utterly failed to drive this debate. Rather, The Stanford Review, this blog, and an increasing number of student voices are driving this more open debate... The committee is reading letters submitted to it by members of the Stanford community, but how many people knew that, and aren’t the people who write letters likely to be those who feel the strongest on either side of the debate? What of the vast majority of campus that has not fully tuned into the debate but may be seeking to actually explore the issue? The committee is doing a terrible job when it comes to actually getting a feel for this campus because it is only checking the vitals of those at the debate’s poles. Stanford’s ad hoc committee could take a real lesson from Columbia’s ROTC task force. While Columbia’s task force only began considering the issue in December, it has since illustrated that it is taking the exploration process seriously. Yesterday, the committee hosted the first of three all-campus forums, and all three forums will be held within the next two and a half weeks." However, as reported in the Columbia Spectator, the Town Hall format used at Columbia was not very illuminating, and for Columbia too, a lot of the most interesting discussion has been online.
9 February 2011 Stanford Daily article "The Gang of 14". Note: Interviewing some of the 14 students at Stanford doing ROTC at other colleges, the Daily learns that "The commutes to these schools, which range from half an hour to an hour on a good day, impact the course selection and extracurricular activities of the cadets.“The commute is part of the time commitment,” said [Air Force ROTC cadet Kirk] Morrow. “There’s definitely been a few times where there’s been a class that I wanted to take but I couldn’t because I would need to be leaving to go to ROTC at the tail end…It was more of the commute that kept me from taking a class than it was ROTC events.”“The fact that it’s not on campus has inhibited my ability to have academic freedom in terms of choosing classes,” added Jimmy Ruck ’11."
9 February 2011 Huffington Post article "The ROTC Controversy: DADT Is Repealed, but Discrimination Remains" by Noah Baron CC'11. Note: Baron suggests that Republicans may re-institute DADT or the military may prosecute soldiers for sodomy.
9 February 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Dems Open to ROTC Return". Note: "Members of the Harvard College Democrats gathered last night to discuss whether the exclusion of trans-identified individuals from the military should prevent the return of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program to campus. Though the organization did not take a formal vote on the matter, those who spoke at the meeting by and large said that ROTC should be welcomed back to Harvard, despite objections over trans exclusion."
11 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald op-ed "Don't Ask, Don't ROTC: Why it's still a bad idea" by Dave Morris '88. Note: Morris argues against a Navy ROTC program because it would require students to take some particular existing Brown courses in areas such as calculus and national security policy, and because failing out of Brown could mean being called up to serve as an enlisted person and gaining excessive weight could result in having to repay a stipend. See letter on 14 February.
11 February 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "Supporting ROTC Supports Queer Rights" by Warner Sallman ’11 and Marloes Sijstermans ‘11. Note: "As queer students and supporters of greater transgender rights, we applaud SSQL’s efforts to draw attention to these issues. That being said, we are concerned that the antagonistic approach taken by SSQL is not representative of the larger queer community and may halt further progress for queer rights in the military... For the first time in the history of this country, representatives are taking queer voices seriously. Their consideration will do much to further social justice, but it merits a response of gratitude and reciprocal action from the queer and allied constituents. By continuing to antagonize the military, SSQL sends the message that no serious concessions will ever satisfy the community. This kind of approach undermines organizational credibility for future advocacy work. Negotiation requires compromise from both sides, and SSQL refuses to acknowledge that reality. In doing so, they obstruct further progress at the Congressional level."
13 February 2011 Columbia Spectator letter "In ROTC debate, army deserves fair treatment" by Doug Kechijian. Note: "As unconventional warfare becomes more common, even the military’s staunchest critics should want liberally-educated, culturally-sensitive officers among those advising elected officials about security policy and, just as importantly, performing ground-level diplomacy like meeting with tribal elders in Afghanistan to implement counterinsurgency measures."
14 February 2011 Columbia University Task Force on Military Engagement "E-Mails to 2/13". Note: The emails include one from Paul S. Frommer '57, who wrote that excluding ROTC "surely has helped to fulfill President Eisenhower’s remarks as to beware of a military-industrial complex. What better way than this, to segregate the American forces officer corps from the entire general public".
14 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald letter "Requisites no reason to reject ROTC" by Jennifer Grayson '11. Note: Addressing concerns over ROTC course requirements, Grayson cites the more extensive requirements for pre-medical students.
14 February 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "No Free Lunch: A Motion to Express Support for a Non-Binding Referendum" by Dave Grundfest and Zack Hoberg. Note: The authors ask whether the ROTC issue should be seen as a rights issue, "whether this kind of issue should ever be subject to public opinion" in which a majority suppresses the right of some to choose ROTC.
15 February 2011 Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement hearing transcript and audio. Note: The transcript also includes the opening speech by Columbia College Dean Michelle Moody-Adams, in which she said "I’m asking you to consider whether it might be good for the undergraduate experience of both ROTC and non-ROTC students alike if the ROTC were to make an official return to Columbia. I’m not going to answer these questions for you."
15 February 2011 Comments at the Columbia University ROTC Town Hall by Will Prasifka. Note: Prasifka goes through the thought experiment of whether Columbia should an expel an organization that has some shortcomings, and make a plea for tolerance of diversity.
16 February 2011 Columbia spectator article "College dean speaks out in favor of ROTC:Two hundred students and faculty members turned out for the second ROTC town hall Tuesday night." Note: Columbia College Dean Michele Moody-Adams said that with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” the country is in a new era, and Columbia should consider finding an official place for ROTC on campus. “The right question for us is no longer how could we ever recognize ROTC formally on our campus. We’ve moved to how could we not”. She said that even if the country has not “moved as far as it could on the question of discrimination,” now is the time for Columbia to help produce “citizen soldiers” who would benefit from the Core Curriculum. "Learned Foote, CCSC ’11 and Columbia College Student Council president, said many of the people who speak publicly about ROTC have radical opinions.“I do wonder what the median Columbia student thinks about this,” he said." See letter on 17 March.
16 February 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Bring back ROTC: The army's faults should not prevent us from allowing ROTC on campus" by Kaley Hanenkrat. Note: The president of the Columbia University College Democrats writes that "refusing to interact with the institutions that shape our country until they are perfect is not a solution. The US military is far from perfect, but problems come from bad policy—policies that can be changed by our political leaders... As we saw with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” changes that were considered virtually impossible a decade ago can be made when we work for them."
16 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ROTC Hearing, Part 2: “How Can We Not Invite Them Back?”". Note: Arguments against ROTC were "more limited" than at the 7 February hearing, and among the anti-ROTC arguments "Transgender people are still discriminated against and barred from military, this would directly oppose Columbia’s nondiscrimination statement. This was the primary argument used throughout the night."
16 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "PrezBo By the Fire". Note: Columbia president Lee Bollinger was asked by students about ROTC, and he "refused to give a personal opinion on the question. “I really don’t want to get too deep into the ROTC question because I want to see how it’s debated in the community,” he said when a second student asked about ROTC. He was so interested in hearing the opinions of the students present that he welcomed a few comments from students and then asked for a show of hands: with the understanding that no changes in curriculum would be made to accommodate ROTC, how many students would welcome ROTC back to campus? About 80% of the students raised their hands. Only a few were opposed, and an equal number declared themselves undecided."
16 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "USenate Task Force on Military Engagement Releases Student Survey". Note: "There are general questions about the military’s relationship with Columbia, and there is a question that directly asks: I ______ of a return of ROTC to Columbia’s campuses."
16 February 2011 Faculty for a Reserve Officers Training Corps Program. Note: "The affirmative case for an ROTC program at Columbia has been crowded out by debate over legislation prohibiting military service by open homosexuals. The repeal of that legislation makes it possible to clearly state that case", which they do with 8 major points.
17 February 2011 Letter from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to the Harvard Corporation. Note: The letter urges the Harvard Corporation to commit Harvard to official recognition of ROTC now, "whether or not there is an official ROTC unit on campus". It also notes that Harvard has only two undergraduates under the GI Bill Yellow Ribbon Program, while other colleges such as Columbia have orders of magnitude more. The letter notes that this "may be due to Harvard's interpretation of Ivy Scholarship rules, which were written for the laudable purpose of avoiding bidding wars for top student scholars or athletes. But Harvard's implementation of those rules may have the unintended consequence of limiting service-based undergraduate scholarships... We ask you to ensure that Harvard's application of the rules is not impeding its ability to support veterans."
18 February 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Harvard Political Union Debates ROTC". Note: Some promoted ROTC as a form of public service that Harvard should support, but Christian C. Anderson ’13 responded that “Harvard should promote public service, but supporting the military as a particular form of service is problematic. Not everything the military does constitutes public service” and suggested that the proper "neutral stance" was to exclude ROTC but not prohibit Harvard students from participating in ROTC, as long as it was somewhere else.
18 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Dean’s ROTC speech upsets queer groups". Note: Dean Michele Moody-Adams asked questions such as "what if an elite liberal arts education proved especially likely to create leaders who understand what it takes to turn others into citizen soldiers? What if having an official ROTC presence at a school like Columbia might be a valuable and reliable means of ensuring the creation of citizen soldiers?" ROTC opponents considered these to be a strong endorsement of ROTC before many students and University Senators had formed an opinion.
18 February 2011 Columbia spectator letter "Dean Moody-Adams responds to Spectator's coverage of the ROTC debate". Note: The dean of Columbia College makes clear that at the ROTC hearing she was raising questions to consider about ROTC to stimulate discussion and not to shut down discussion. She quoted the closing words of her remarks "I invite you to consider whether the right question may no longer be ‘How could we ever formally recognize ROTC on our campus?’ but, instead, ‘How can we not welcome them back?’ Please do not shy away from this important debate.”"
20 February 2011 New York Post article "Hero's unwelcome: Wounded Iraq vet jeered at Columbia". Note: During a Town Hall meeting about ROTC a student veteran who spoke in favor of ROTC was taunted, hissed and booed. The Post quotes Columbia ROTC student José Robledo as suggesting that such conduct towards a Purple Heart awardee has been to the detriment of their case against ROTC.
20 February 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Fact and judgement about ROTC: Columbia has room for ROTC and might even benefit from it" by Prof. Allan Silver. Note: A Columbia sociology professor writes that "America needs a military drawn from the whole nation, including its most selective institutions of higher learning, where its future leaders are exposed to the critical edge that Columbia and its sister institutions offer. We don’t want a military comfortable only in its own cultural skin and future civilian leaders with little sense of fellow citizens who serve in it."
20 February 2011 Columbia Spectator blog item "Task Force releases audio of veteran’s speech in ROTC hearing". Note: A link is provided to the episode described in the 20 February NY Post article.
21 February 2011 Columbia University Task Force on Military Engagement E-Mails to 2/20.
21 February 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "Vote yes: The Editorial Board weighs in and offers its support of ROTC." Note: Columbia's student newspaper argues that having ROTC would increase campus diversity of economic background, outlook and experience. Addressing imperfections in the military, the editorial says "Engagement—not self-imposed segregation—is the way to reform. The military is not a company that we can boycott or a country from which we can divest—it is a vital part of our nation’s identity that cannot be ignored."
21 February 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "ROTC and Columbia complement each other: Both Columbia and the military can gain from partnership through ROTC" by James Cabot. Note: "If one hates armed conflict, then one should support a strong American military, led by the highest caliber officer corps—including officer graduates of Columbia."
21 February 2011 Columbia Spectator Spectrum blog item "Wounded veteran comments on audience jeers in second hearing". Note: Anthony Maschek wrote "Comments by a small number of individuals at the town hall meeting have not changed my positive experiences at Columbia. Thus far, my fellow students have been very interested in hearing about my past life and military experiences. Columbia has been attempting to get more veterans to share their experiences here, and the atmosphere here has been supportive despite the actions of a very small minority of the town hall participants."
21 February 2011 "Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement Statement on Events of February 15, 2011". Note: The statement points out how unusual the incivility in the 15 February Town Hall meeting was, and lists highlights of Columbia's "long history of engagement with the U.S. Armed Forces."
22 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Students surprised, worried by national media coverage on ROTC: Students say many got a bad rap in national media coverage". Note: "In a statement that he sent to the media on Monday night, Maschek said he feels no animosity towards Columbia. “Comments by a small number of individuals at the town hall meeting have not changed my positive experiences at Columbia,” Maschek wrote. “Thus far, my fellow students have been very interested in hearing about my past life and military experiences. Columbia has been attempting to get more veterans to share their experiences here, and the atmosphere here has been supportive despite the actions of a very small minority of the town hall participants.”"
22 February 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "Come heckle or high water: The Editorial Board responds to media coverage of ROTC hearing". Note: The Columbia student newspaper denounces the 20 February NY Post article as overblown, and points out the military-friendly nature of the university.
22 February 2011 Stanford Daily column "An Argument Against ROTC’s Return, from an Actual Transgender Person’s Perspective" by Cristopher Bautista. Note: Bautista writes "I refuse to be told to sit quietly and let people who do not know me tell me what I should and should not do. I reserve the right to speak my opinion as a human being. Only I know what is truly good for me, and only transgender people know what is good for themselves. Thus, I say NO to the return of ROTC to Stanford."
22 February 2011 Huffington Post article "ROTC at Columbia University: Regarding the Heckling of a Veteran" by Marco Reininger. Note: A veteran of the war in Afghanistan and political science major at Columbia writes that "the heckling of Anthony Maschek ... reminds people of a shameful time in this country's past when many abandoned our military and our veterans because they couldn't separate their grievances with politics from the men and women serving in uniform. Columbia was a center of protest during this period, which lent it the military hating stigma it is unsuccessfully trying to shake to this day. A stigma that in 2011 is unjustified." He goes on to describe the very positive attitude at Columbia towards veterans.
22 February 2011 press release "Columbia Veterans Support University in ROTC Controversy". Note: A coalition of 4 veterans organizations "wish to state that the disrespectful conduct of a few individuals in no way reflects the consensus attitude of Columbia students and faculty toward the student-veteran population. On the contrary, its enthusiastic support of military veterans is precisely the reason why Columbia now hosts the largest veteran population of any Ivy League institution: 340 in total, over 200 of whom are undergraduates."
23 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Anti-ROTC coalition holds own discussion". Note: Feride Eralp, of the newly formed "Coalition Against ROTC", said that the exclusively anti-ROTC environment was necessary because the town halls “do not provide a safe space” to discuss ROTC’s return and "the administration is biased in favour of ROTC".
23 February 2011 Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement hearing transcript and audio.
24 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "At final ROTC town hall, some criticize process". Note: "Asher Levine, GSAS ’11, said he decided to support ROTC after reading some literature that an anti-ROTC group was handing out on College Walk. “They seemed like really specious arguments that confused thoughts about the military—and American foreign policy in general—with what the ROTC really is and would do on campus,” Levine said."
24 February 2011 Inside Higher Ed article "Roadblocks for ROTC?". Note: The article analyzes the issues that have emerged since the repeal of DADT.
24 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Update: Faculty Positions on ROTC". Note: The text is given of a statement by Columbia faculty opposed to ROTC. The professors “hold it to be a matter of the most profound principle and educational philosophy that the idea of a university and the ethos of the military are incompatible”. Their key reason was that the military “trains people for obedience to the chain of command, whereas the university cultivates a critical and constantly questioning consciousness”. The statement goes on to say that the military violates Columbia's non-discrimination statement in considering physical disability and age when admitting students to ROTC programs. See a response on 28 February and an Issues page in response.
24 February 2011 "No ROTC" coaltion "Our Statement". A group opposes ROTC at Columbia, listing the transgender issue, violence against women in the military, ROTC being part of the military, the credit issue and the income issue.
25 February 2011 DNAinfo article "Mayor Bloomberg Urges Columbia to Bring Back ROTC". Note: On a radio talk show, Bloomberg said "I think Columbia should — my personal opinion, I can't tell Columbia what to do — but they should open an ROTC program and give the kids the alternative".
25 February 2011 Military.com article "Heckled Vet Bucks Columbia Critics". Note: The veteran makes it clear that the heckling was not directed at him being a veteran or even being in support of ROTC, but instead "was spurred by his saying that America has enemies in the world that "want to kill you.""
25 February 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "Keep ROTC out" by Julian Park. Note: Park argues that universities are welcoming ROTC in order to increase their prestige.
28 February 2011 Columbia spectator article "Student groups avoid official stance on ROTC". Note: The CU Dems and the Columbia Queer Alliance, among otherts, have decided to remain neutral on ROTC due to differing opinions among members.
28 February 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Faculty statement falls short: The professors who oppose ROTC are neglecting a number of key issues" by Learned Foote '11and Sean Wilkes '06. Note: Two leaders of pro-ROTC student efforts find many problems in the anti-ROTC faculty statement.
March 2011 Aviation History article "America's First Homegrown Ace". Note: The article describes Douglas Campbell, the son of the president of the University of California and the "first American-trained fighter pilot to shoot down a German plane in World War I" and "the first USAS airman to notch five confirmed aerial victories". He dropped out of Harvard "with his friend Quentin Roosevelt, youngest son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, in order to join the Air Service".
1 March 2011 Harvard Crimson article "ACTA Advocates for ROTC Recognition". Note: The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has asked Harvard's governing Corporation to "commit Harvard to official recognition of ROTC... That can be done by the Corporation immediately—whether or not there is an official ROTC unit on campus". "Some have argued that there is not enough interest on campus to justify creating a unit at Harvard. But [ACTA President Anne] Neal ['77] said that she believes that this is a “chicken and egg” problem, and that recognition and publicity of ROTC will lead to greater interest and participation in the program."
1 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Why I signed: We need to get back in touch with our military, right here on campus" by Mark Lilla. Note: A humanities professor describes his college experience where the "students I knew were upper-middle class kids who had never met a soldier, yet had baroque theories about the military-industrial complex, and totally unrealistic views about war. I had no respect for them" and rejects the notion that the world would be better off if Columbia students were kept as separate as possible from the military. "In democracies you do not control the military by holding soldiers at arm’s length. You do it by holding them close."
1 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Better off without: Bringing ROTC back would intensify class differences, not reduce them" by Tyler Williams. Note: A PhD student in literature argues that a person from a low income background going to Columbia and then serving in the military inhibits social mobility.
2 March 2011 DNAinfo article "ROTC Has No Plans For Columbia Return Even If Invited Back". Note: A New York City local news site interviewed an Army ROTC official who was skeptical of his branch offering Columbia an ROTC program. This issue is discussed in more detail in the Issues Page "If top colleges ask for ROTC programs, will any be offered?"
2 March 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "ROTC: Undecided: Or, what I wish I had said at the town hall" by Aki Terasaki. Note: An undergraduate expresses frustration with the adversarial process used to discuss the ROTC issue and call for a more centrist, fact-based approach to be taken by the Task Force in synthesizing the information about ROTC.
3 March 2011 Columbia University Task Force on Military Engagement E-Mails to 3/2.
3 March 2011 AFP article "US military struggles in campus battle". Note: Some cherish the civil-military divide and others bemoan it.
3 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Campus debate on ROTC intensifies". Note: Provost David Kertzer '69 "was a member of the committee that examined ROTC policy in the 1960s" and "wrote a minority dissent rejecting the committee's recommendations to modify the on-campus ROTC program but not eliminate it entirely." At the time he wrote "The very idea that the faculty of Brown University has a ‘responsibility' to devise military training programs on campus must be seriously challenged".
3 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "Painting Brown Khaki" by Ian Trupin. Note: An undergraduate argues that Brown students wouldn't be able to influence the character of the military.
3 March 2011 Stanford Daily article "Case brought against ASSU ROTC advisory bill". Note: Alok Vaid-Menon ’13, president of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation is trying to block a referendum on ROTC, saying it is like “putting civil rights on the ballot box” over the transgender issue. He said "The University is very firm in its non-discrimination policy, which includes gender identity. It seems generally silly to have a question that violates this University policy."
3 March 2011 Boston Globe article "Harvard to officially recognize Naval ROTC". Note: "Harvard will appoint a director of Naval ROTC and will assume financial responsibility for the costs of its students’ participation in the program, but students will still be participating through a consortium unit at MIT, which has hosted the unit for many years. The Navy has determined that maintaining the consortium, which encompasses students from several colleges, is the best for the “efficiency and effectiveness of the ‘Old Ironsides Battalion,’” Harvard officials said. Harvard, though, will provide Naval ROTC with office space and access to classrooms and athletic fields for participating students." The arrangement sounds similar to that at Dartmouth, where Army ROTC uses Dartmouth facilities but is an extension of the program at Norwich University. Dartmouth gives faculty appointments, and the "director of Naval ROTC" title at Harvard sounds similar to the "Director of Army Officer Education Program ... indicating a rank equivalent to the senior academic rank of professor" title given to the head of Army ROTC at Princeton. There is no word on course credit, but even before this announcement "Specific naval seminars courses can be taken by cross-registration and count toward a student's undergraduate degree".
3 March 2011 Harvard Gazette article "Harvard welcomes back ROTC: Navy Secretary Mabus joins President Faust to sign agreement". Note: In addition, "Harvard also has begun pursuing discussions about renewing formal ties with ROTC programs associated with other branches of the Armed Forces. In addition to signing the agreement with the Navy, Faust announced the intended formation of an ROTC implementation committee, to be chaired by Kevin “Kit” Parker, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in Applied Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, as well as an Army major who has served three tours in Afghanistan. The committee, whose work is expected to span not only issues concerning Naval ROTC but eventually other service branches as well, will explore ways to enhance the experience of Harvard ROTC students consistent with the broad framework outlined in the new agreement."
3 March 2011 Columbia Spectator Spectrums blog item "Task Force releases report on ROTC findings". Note: Students voted 60% in favor of "a return of ROTC to Columbia’s campuses".
3 March 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Harvard to Officially Recognize Naval ROTC: An agreement to be signed tomorrow ends a 40 year standoff between the University and the military". Note: Prof Kevin “Kit” Parker, chair of the newly created ROTC implementation committee, said that "We have to put Harvard’s assets on the table and say it is worth your while to train your cadets here". Parker said he believes that with recognition, the admissions office will have more traction in communities where the military is highly valued. "It is time to scoop that talent" he said.
4 March 2011 Boston Herald article "ROTC is back at Harvard". Note: David Gergen, the director of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, who has supported efforts to restore ROTC on campus, said "It has long been apparent that only a small proportion of the population is fighting our wars today, and it’s essential that students from elite universities be among them".
4 March 2011 Boston Globe article "Harvard, Navy to sign ROTC pact: Repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was key". Note: "The university will begin making payments to MIT to cover the costs of its students’ participation. The amount has not been determined, but currently, a group of Harvard alumni pays MIT between $100,000 and $400,000 a year to subsidize Harvard ROTC students’ participation... One Harvard professor, though, said the university should go a step further and woo the military to establish a separate ROTC unit at Harvard. “Just inviting ROTC back to campus is not enough. We have to sell Harvard to the military,’’ said Kit Parker, an engineering professor and Army major who has served three tours in Afghanistan. “There might be some hard feelings in the Department of Defense and frankly, I don’t blame them,’’ he added. “We need to put something on the table and say we’re going to make this worth your while, because we can help you build better commissioned officers than other schools.’’".
4 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "ROTC reinstated on Harvard’s campus". Note: "Chair of the Harvard Trans Task Force Jia Hui Lee said the announcement was a "rude shock" to transgender advocates, who say the military's policies violate the school nondiscrimination code, despite the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell.""Since Harvard prides itself of being one of the leading institutions in the U.S., this sets a very dangerous precedent for other schools to disregard their (transgender) students," Lee said. He is organizing a protest that will take place outside Faust's office this afternoon as she signs the agreement."
4 March 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Harvard Announces Return of ROTC". Note: Alok Vaid-Menon, president of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, wrote of Harvard President Drew Faust (who is female) "Harvard was never transparent about the procedure they were adopting for this question. Last time they had a vote by the faculty. This time it seems like the President made a decision himself. This is a violation of student rights and faculty rights and is in direct violation of Harvard’s non-discrimination clause." However, as pointed out in the comments, Harvard's policy refers to discrimination "unrelated to course requirements", and since eligibility for military commissioning is a pre-requisite for certain ROTC courses Harvard is not violating its policy.
4 March 2011 Huffington Post column "ROTC on Campus Is a Good Thing" by Lorelei Kelly. Note: A former congresswoman writes "70% of Americans declare that the military is the most trusted institution in society. ROTC on campus gives everybody more chances to interact, to socialize and to learn about this belief. ROTC detractors should take comfort: an ongoing dialogue is the best defense against militarism."
4 March 2011 Huffington Post article "ROTC at Harvard: Welcome Back" by Daniel Koh. Note: A Harvard MBA student writes "My ROTC friends at Harvard are among the bravest and most respectable people I know. They could have taken any number of well-paying, high-prestige jobs, yet felt compelled to serve their country first after graduation. They weren't in it for glory, power, or some other ulterior motive -- they simply wanted to give back to the country that had given them so much."
4 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Task force releases ROTC survey on student opinions; faculty speaks out via opposing petitions". Note: "The task force will present a full summary of its findings at the University Senate’s full body meeting this afternoon at 1:15 p.m. The University Senate is expected to vote on ROTC at either its April 1 or April 29 full-body meetings."
4 March 2011 Contentions (Commentary) blog item "ROTC Returns to Harvard but Remains AWOL from Some Ivy League Campuses" by Max Boot. Note: "Now it is high time for other elite institutions that have been dragging their feet — that means you, Columbia; you too, Stanford — to invite ROTC back on campus. And it is equally important for the armed forces to accept the invitation."
4 March 2011 Columbia University "Report of the Task Force on Military Engagement".
4 March 2011 Columbia Spectator Spectrums blog item "Liveblog: University Senate discusses ROTC". Note: "Professor Helene Aguilar, addressing concerns about how exactly an ROTC program would be implemented, says that she is “concerned that you may find it more difficult than one would think to establish these terms and limitations.” For instance, she said, recent reports have indicated that ROTC cadets are not allowed to refer to info released by WikiLeaks, which is still considered classified. “That struck me as problematic, as the institution we are,” Aguilar says." A comment posted on the blog post minutes later quoted perspective on the WikiLeaks issue from the Advocates for ROTC "Issues" pages : "ROTC students are not prohibited from reading accounts of WikiLeaks information, and are not even prohibited from accessing the WikiLeaks web site, but they are discouraged from accessing the WikiLeaks site since it might make it more difficult to get security clearance."
4 March 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "USenate Discusses ROTC Report". Note: President Lee Bollinger "expressed the need for an open, fact-based discussion and called the Senate “the right body to institute that discussion.”" He "said that he thinks the conditions will be favorable to “at least one branch of the ROTC,” (almost certainly Naval ROTC, the program Columbia participated in prior to 1969) but quickly qualified that statement, stating it was “just a preliminary” opinion." There was also some discussion of the WikiLeaks and faculty appointment issues.
4 March 2011 Harvard - Navy ROTC Agreement Signed.
4 March 2011 Harvard University text of remarks "President Drew Faust: Harvard Welcomes Back ROTC".
4 March 2011 US Navy transcript "Remarks by the Honorable Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy, Harvard University".
4 March 2011 White House "Statement by the Press Secretary on Harvard’s Decision to Welcome the ROTC Back to Campus". Note: "The decision by Harvard University to formally welcome the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps to its campus is an important step in moving past the old divisions that often kept many Americans from seeing what we share with one another, including love of country and a profound respect for our brave men and women in uniform... this sends a powerful message that Americans stand united and that our colleges, society and armed forces are stronger when we honor the contributions of all our citizens, especially our troops and military families who sacrifice for our freedoms."
4 March 2011 Harvard Gazette article "Signing ceremony welcomes ROTC: Program to return to Harvard campus". Note: "Maura Sullivan, M.P.A./M.B.A. ’09, a former captain in the Marines who served as co-president of the Armed Forces Alumni Association while at Harvard, always found that the University “embraced” her military service. “I very much felt my service was way beyond tolerated — it was welcomed, it was championed, it was encouraged, and it was respected,” she said. Sullivan has been a longtime advocate of bringing ROTC back to Harvard, calling for it publicly in 2009 at a campus event with Army Gen. David Petraeus, key strategist of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Friday’s signing might have seemed to come out of the blue to observers, she said, but in fact it represents “a culmination of a lot of people’s efforts.” David Gergen, the Public Service Professor of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Center for Public Leadership, echoed Sullivan’s statements. “Drew Faust has taken the lead among the presidents of elite universities in restoring ROTC,” said Gergen, a former member of the Navy Reserves and an advocate of Harvard-military relations. “Harvard creates a ripple effect, and other universities are much more likely to follow that.”". Also represented was Advocates for Harvard ROTC, and the article noted that the event traced its roots to the founding of the Advocates "in 1988 by David Clayman ’38, who died just six weeks ago".
4 March 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Harvard Signs Agreement to Officially Recognize Naval ROTC". Note: Responding to demonstrators over the transgender issue, "Several faculty members at the ceremony acknowledged the protesters’ concerns, noting that they intend to work toward reconciling this issue."
5 March 2011 Boston Globe article ""Harvard welcomes ROTC back to campus". Note: Navy Secretary Ray Mabus "said he hopes Harvard’s decision to reestablish the program on campus will cause other universities to reconsider their policies. "I really hope that they see it the same way Harvard sees it, which is the opening up of opportunity" Mabus said. Senator John F. Kerry sent a letter yesterday to Yale University, his alma mater, asking the school to follow Harvard’s lead in reestablishing ROTC on campus. The agreement also drew praise from the White House. “The decision by Harvard University to formally welcome the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps to its campus is an important step in moving past the old divisions that often kept many Americans from seeing what we share with one another, including love of country and a profound respect for our brave men and women in uniform,’’ White House press secretary Jay Carney said yesterday in a prepared statement." See letter on 11 March.
5 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "More details from ROTC survey indicate division between schools". Note: "[General Studies] and [School of International and Political Affairs] students overwhelmingly favored ROTC’s return, by 71-23 and 66-28 margins, respectively. [School of Engineering and Applied Science] students approved of ROTC by a 70-23 margin. A majority of [Columbia College] students supported ROTC as well, although the margin in CC was narrower, with 59 percent supporting ROTC and 35 percent opposing it. Barnard was the only school to oppose ROTC. Forty-seven percent of Barnard students said they would disapprove of ROTC’s return, while 42 percent said they would approve of it." As the Columbia University Senate began to debate ROTC, "Task force co-chair Roosevelt Montas, CC '95, MA '96, PhD '04, and Associate Dean for the Core Curriculum, told concerned senators that Columbia would control the structure of the program, a statement echoed in the task force’s report. “Academic appointment and course credit must remain under complete control of the faculty of Columbia, and never under ROTC or the military,” Montas said. “So every subsequent discussion of the issue has had that as an assumption, as a premise.” The senate meets April 1 and April 29, and will almost certainly vote on an ROTC resolution at one of these meetings."
5 March 2011 Yale Daily News article "ROTC return to Harvard encourages Yale, Levin says". Note: Yale's president said "Yale is engaged in active conversations to bring ROTC back to our campus ... Harvard's success encourages us to continue our pursuit of this objective."
6 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "On ROTC: By allowing ROTC, Columbia can provide the military with the young minds it needs" by Jagdish Bhagwati. Note: A professor of economics and law relates how his daughter has worked on women's issues in the military and says that none of her accomplishments in this area would have happened "if she had not joined the Marines in the first place ... The strongest argument for ROTC, now that DADT has been defeated and will go within a year for sure, is that ROTC is one more, and indeed an important, way people like Anu are brought into the military... I should add that familiarity breeds contempt, but contempt does not breed familiarity."
7 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Schools show varied support for ROTC return". Note: "Barnard senator Sara Snedeker, BC ’12, said it is “extremely important” that Barnard was the only school to have a plurality disapprove of an ROTC return to Columbia. But she also noted that only 17 percent of Barnard students took part in the survey."
7 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald letter "ROTC should not receive special privileges" by Kevin Casto '13. Note: Casto argues against providing transportation for ROTC students to get to cross-town programs.
7 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald letter "LGBTQ’s against ROTC aren’t hypocrites" by Yvonne Yu '13. Note: Yu argues that "If some people do not want ROTC here for ideological reasons, they are not oppressing anyone's freedom of choice by expressing these opinions", though by carrying out their opinions they would.
7 March 2011 Wall Street Journal video "ROTC Back at Harvard". Note: Anne Neal, head of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni discusses whether trustees or faculty should decide on allowing ROTC. She said "It's time for the trustees to say, yes, we will formally recognize ROTC, and then to call on the faculty to undertake the effort it needs to figure out how to have courses that can receive credit for ROTC on campus".
8 March 2011 Harvard Crimson editorial "Moving Forward with the Military: As a ROTC participant, Harvard should advocate for the right of all students to serve". Note: The Crimson calls for the two elements of the ROTC+ approach: "the military science courses that ROTC students are required to take should be eligible for university credit. More should also be done to add components of military history to the College’s history course offerings at large, very few of which deal with topics relating to military history."
8 March 2011 Saltzman Institute of war and Peace Studies and School of International and Public Affairs (Columbia) video "Perspectives on ROTC at Columbia".
9 March 2011 Columbia spectator article "At meeting, Barnard faculty votes against ROTC's return". Note: The vote took place on 7 March at a Barnard faculty meeting. Barnard's Provost Elizabeth Boylan wrote that “It should be noted that this vote took place without knowledge of the exact wording of a motion that the Senate will consider”. The article did not give the vote totals, but English professor Peter Platt, one of Barnard’s two faculty senators said “there’s not unanimity by any means”.
9 March 2011 Christian Science Monitor op-ed "With DADT out of the way, Harvard and military make a great couple" by Dan Caldwell. Note: A professor of political science at Pepperdine University and former Naval officer outlines 8 reasons why ROTC should return to elite university campuses. One is "I found that officers educated at universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford often had markedly different attitudes than their peers from the military academies or state universities with large ROTC programs. I believe that the presence of such officers in the military is highly desirable; they are representative of an important segment of American society that is currently under-represented in the military. They are more likely to question unreasonable or illegal orders or policies than those educated in a more militarily, hierarchically oriented environment." Another is "I served on a university committee at Stanford University that negotiated with the Department of Defense (DOD) concerning academic credit for ROTC courses. In these negotiations, the Department of Defense indicated its willingness to grant ROTC credit for courses taught by Stanford professors. For example, a course on war and conflict taught by the respected Professor Peter Paret, a translator of Clausewitz’s “On War,” would have been granted credit for the required ROTC course on military history. If DOD were now willing to accept such courses, the objection to having non-Stanford professors teaching courses for academic credit would be lessened."
9 March 2011 Stanford Daily article "Hennessy, Lythcott-Haims respond to advising concerns, ROTC at joint legislative meeting". Note: "ROTC’s potential return made an appearance in discourse several times over the meeting. Janani Balasubramanian ‘12 asked Hennessy to discuss how the administration was considering the military’s exclusion of transgender individuals in the ROTC discussion. Hennessy responded that the question was a complex one. He said in both potential outcomes, “some group of students will not be able to participate in a program they would like to participate in.”"
9 March 2011 Medill News Service article in the Army Times "Return of ROTC at Ivies could build bridges". Note: The article repeats the myth that universities have avoided the Solomon Amendment by the way they excluded ROTC or by allowing cross-town ROTC.
9 March 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Faculty Perspectives on ROTC: “The Senate Isn’t the Sovereign Body of the University”". Note: Reporting on a faculty panel on the ROTC issue, BWOG noted that Prof. Allan Silver "stated the obvious but critically overlooked fact the contracts are signed by students as consenting adults, and the University should respect their right to exercise that agency." Prof. Bruce Robbins, who said “I have better things to do” than participate in the forum, said that the US military's practices are immoral and illegal. There was "surprising agreement between the four panelists on the following: If the ROTC were to return to campus it would only be as an extra curricular activity. Conditions would include that military instructors not be appointed as full professors and that courses would not count for academic credit, as is currently the case at MIT and Princeton. Silver called the idea of the military owning a piece of the university “abhorrent.” The faculty firmly believe they should have the final say. “The senate isn’t the sovereign body of the university, the faculty is the sovereign body of the university,” concluded Silver, siding with Helfand. He objects to phraseology of ROTC “returning”; if the program comes back it will be “on our terms, not their terms.”"
9 March 2011 Huffington Post column "Return of ROTC to Columbia University? An Issue Much Larger Than 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'" by Katherine Franke. Note: The director of Columbia's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law makes the incompatible values argument about the university and the military.
10 March 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed "Columbia University's ROTC Shame" by Jacques Barzun. Note: A former provost and professor of history at Columbia University calls on Columbia to live by the virtues of the Citizen soldier about which they learn in Columbia's renowned Core Curriculum, and restore ROTC. He criticizes a statement from anti-ROTC faculty, which warns of "militirization" of the campus, and notes that they "ignore the Eisenhower Leadership Development Program, a joint endeavor with West Point that sends dozens of commissioned and uniformed officers each year to Columbia's sacrosanct campus." See letters on 16 March.
10 March 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Faculty Recall ROTC History". Note: Faculty members discuss factors underlying the greater support for the military now than 40 years ago, including a higher percentage of students coming from communities in which the military is valued. Faculty interviewed generally expressed support for ROTC, but wanted the faculty to be involved in decisions about course credit.
11 March 2011 Boston Globe letter "Sweet elation as barrier to ROTC falls at Harvard" by Willard K. Rice. Note: A board member of Advocates for Harvard ROTC stresses the far larger number of people who turned out to support the return of ROTC than oppose it.
12 March 2011 Stanford Daily article "Constitutional Council rules in favor of ROTC advisory bill". Note: A 4-0 vote of the Constitutional Council decided that the non-binding question to the student body regarding support for ROTC will remain on the spring elections ballot.
13 March 2011 Columbia Spectator letter "In ROTC debate, army deserves fair treatment" by Doug Kechijian. Note: "As unconventional warfare becomes more common, even the military’s staunchest critics should want liberally-educated, culturally-sensitive officers among those advising elected officials about security policy and, just as importantly, performing ground-level diplomacy like meeting with tribal elders in Afghanistan to implement counterinsurgency measures."
14 March 2011 Washington Post editorial "ROTC's return". Note: The editors applaud the Harvard-Navy ROTC agreement and write "Once the Ivy taboo is gone, the nation's military and its universities can reengage on the subject of how best to support student achievement and military manpower needs in the new educational and security environment of the 21st century."
14 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald op-ed "Confronting transgender discrimination in ROTC" by Maddy Jennewein '14. Note: The co-president of GenderAction claims that "Prospective soldiers undergo a medical examination in which anyone with prior genital surgery is rejected". This is not true for people whose surgery was done at birth, but doctors have been reluctant to do such surgery at birth in recent decades, making what would have been a non-issue concerning the military an issue today, as discussed on the Transgender issues page.
14 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald letter "Alums in service support ROTC reinstatement". Note: Fifteen write that "we believe the qualities that are the hallmark of a Brown graduate — passion, intellectual curiosity, diversity of perspectives — benefit the military as an organization".
14 March 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Women’s Coalition Rejects ROTC’s Return to Campus". Note: "All Women’s Coalition candidates must speak out against ROTC’s discriminatory policy towards trans people (as of now transwomen cannot join the ROTC program, which stands as gender discrimination) and its failure to adequately address the sexual violence, rape, and sexual assault of women serving in the military." However, it was not clear that constituent groups had even been consulted on this statement.
15 March 2011 Tufts Daily article "After DADT repeal, Harvard extends official recognition to naval ROTC". Note: Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences James Glaser, who serves as Tufts' ROTC representative on campus, said "Here at Tufts, we pay a fee to MIT so that our students can participate. We help pay for the overhead and the salaries and such with our own university monies... So basically Harvard is now going to be doing what we're doing, which is officially sponsoring ROTC."
16 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Committee on ROTC updates community". Note: Dean Katherine Bergeron of Brown College reported on behalf of Brown's committee on ROTC that "the University will not need to offer academic credit for ROTC classes." This corrects the error in the 3 February editorial, as discussed in the Credit issues page, but no retraction was added to the editorial. In addition, in the article, "Bergeron also discussed her attendance at the Ivy Plus conference — a consortium of universities, including members of the Ivy League as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and Stanford — where deans from the universities discussed their respective plans to offer or not offer ROTC programs... Bergeron said it looks likely that Columbia, Yale and Stanford will do the same. If this were the case, Brown would be the only Ivy League university not to have a ROTC program on campus."
20 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Enhancing Columbia’s role in the military: The military would benefit from Columbia graduates and Columbia should respond to the call" by LTC Eliot Goldman. Note: Columbia College’s highest-ranking active service member writes "The opportunities for the finest education in our land need to be available to future service members. The ability of future leaders to see people on a daily basis in uniform as people, and not as a sub-species, should be part of a Columbia education."
21 March 2011 Yale Daily News op-ed "It’s time for action on ROTC" by Christopher Day. Note: A 2007 Yale and ROTC graduate calls for Yale to take the first step and announce openness to ROTC without waiting for the military to announce a willingness to support ROTC at Yale.
21 March 2011 Socialist Worker article "No ROTC at Columbia". Note: The article claims "the administration has on numerous occasions attempted to bring ROTC back. In 2001, 2005 and 2008, the issue of welcoming ROTC back to campus was raised, and each time, the University Senate voted down the program's reinstitution on campus". Actually, none of the movements was led by the administration, and the 2005 effort was vehemently opposed by the administration, with the provost comparing those supporting ROTC to racists. "In response to the university's attempt to bring back ROTC on campus, a group of students have formed the "No ROTC" coalition that is organizing to ensure that ROTC remains off campus. The coalition, which consists of campus groups including Students for Justice in Palestine, LUCHA and the International Socialist Organization, as well as individual students, opposes ROTC for several reasons." The reason for "Students for Justice in Palestine" was not explained. The article also claimed that the administration framing the ROTC issue in terms of DADT now was "dishonest", even though the university and ROTC opponents had taken that view for the past decade.
21 March 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Draft Senate Resolution to Propose Military Engagement Released". Note: The draft includes: "BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED That Columbia University welcomes the opportunity to explore further mutually beneficial relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps".
22 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "USenators review drafts of ROTC resolution: The draft of the resolution sent to Spectator did not include references to Columbia's nondiscrimination policy". Note: "While the resolution draft expresses support for a return of ROTC to Columbia, it is not tantamount to senate support for ROTC. The full University Senate will likely vote on whether to approve the resolution in April." One Senator said that most opposition to ROTC "has been based on concerns about Columbia becoming militarized or losing its academic autonomy", an issue discussed on the Cultures issues page.
22 March 2011 Morningside Post (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs) blog post "Why ROTC Should Not Return to Campus" by Aarti Sethi. Note: An anthropology student makes the argument that the university and the military are incompatible in their values, and concludes that "The university is a precious space whose imperfect autonomy must be protected". He argues that "a hallmark of democracies is civilian control over the armed forces" and therefore the leaders of both should be educated separately.
22 March 2011 Morningside Post (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs) blog post "Why ROTC Should be Reinstated at Columbia" by Columbia SIPA Vets’ Association. Note: "Why not allow Columbia students to take part in ROTC on their own campus, while at the same time pushing for informed discussion about the larger issues that have been raised by this debate?"
22 March 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Herald poll: students divided on ROTC's return". Note: 43% approved and 24% disapproved; others were undecided or offered no opinion.
23 March 2011 "No ROTC" blog item "Response to the Columbia Senate Resolution Calling for Return of ROTC". Note: The Coalition Opposed to ROTC writes that "it is disturbing that the resolution ignores the outcomes of the discussions on campus in 2008, when strong opposition to ROTC was recorded across campus, partly, but certainly not exclusively due to DADT". In 2008 the aggregate vote was narrowly against ROTC, with DADT widely cited as the dominant reason for opposing ROTC. The Coalition writes "Not once was the military publicly consulted to see whether they would even want to return to Columbia", but doesn't claim that there was no private consultation.
24 March 2011 Harvard Crimson op-ed "Rethinking War" by Felix de Rosen ’13. Note: Discussing ROTC, he writes "what continues to surprise and shock me is why nobody at Harvard opposes the presence of the military on principle... We need to reexamine our respect for the military... We take war too casually, and delegate the responsibilities of war away from us and to our army".
25 March 2011 Yale Daily News column "Student first, soldier second" by Julia Fisher. Note: Despite Yale's motto of “for God, for country, and for Yale”, Fisher opposes ROTC as "trade schooling", and since it separates part of the student body by attire it "would be an assault to the integrity of the community". She also raises the issue of compatibility between university and military attitudes towards questioning authority, and says that students can't learn these approaches at the same time. See response on 27 March.
27 March 2011 Yale Daily News op-ed "Student and soldier" by Katie Miller. Note: A Yale student who transferred from West Point to protest DADT discusses a 25 March column that dismissed ROTC as "trade schooling". She writes "some of the best intellectual discussions I’ve participated in have occurred in military classrooms. I was free to question, investigate and even criticize the U.S. military. Of course there is an appropriate manner in which to express dissent, but the process of educating military leaders is certainly not a blind, asymmetric indoctrination like the one Fisher portrays".
27 March 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "How to be an activist: Student groups should promote open discussion over narrow monologues". Note: The editorial promotes an atmosphere for discussing issues such as ROTC in which one can "strongly support a cause or an idea, while still being open to hearing the other side and challenging one’s opinions", an approach taken at the Advocates for ROTC Issues pages and enunciated by Columbia President Lee Bollinger.
29 March 2011 Yale Daily News article "Committee to consider ROTC’s return formed". Note: The faculty committee will be chaired by engineering professor Gary Haller, and examine two policies enacted by the faculty in 1969-70 that effectively bar ROTC.
29 March 2011 Student Free Press article "Columbia hasn’t approached Army about ROTC". Note: In advance of the University Senate vote on ROTC, "The Army says it would be interested in exploring ROTC’s return to Columbia University, but has not been approached by the school". No information is presented about Columbia-Navy contacts.
29 March 2011 Inside Higher Education article "ROTC Plus". Note: "Dickinson is looking to tighten ties between higher education and the military in other respects. College officials recently submitted a proposal ... to the U.S. Army to beef up its existing ROTC curriculum to include four years of foreign language, cultural immersion, a semester or year’s worth of study abroad among civilians, and a concentration in global security studies. Upon graduation, students would receive a commission with a “certification in global preparedness,” Dickinson officials hope. These requirements, all of which would be supervised by Dickinson faculty, would come on top of the standard ROTC curriculum, which is supervised by military personnel... “America arguably relies on its armed forces to perform a wider variety of functions than any other nation in history,” wrote the authors of "Keeping the Edge: Revitalizing America's Military Officer Corps," which was published by the Center for a New American Security. That paper, which Durden cited as greatly influencing the two initiatives at Dickinson, lays out the argument that a broad liberal arts education ought to be the foundation for future officers in the military. “In addition to demonstrating a high degree of proficiency in conventional state-on-state warfare,” the authors continued, “officers must also develop a broader skill set in politics, economics, and the use of information in modern warfare to cope with a more complicated and rapidly evolving international environment.”"
30 March 2011 Tufts Daily article "Senate resolution supports ROTC recognition on transcripts". Note: "The Education Policy Committee, composed of faculty members, administrators and several students, have already expressed support for the measures".
30 March 2011 Tufts Daily editorial "ROTC deserves credit beyond transcript recognition". Note: The editors discuss the proposal to recognize ROTC participation on transcripts, and suggest in addition "credit that surpasses simply recognition on their transcripts".
30 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "ROTC opponents still angered by poll, perceived lack of safe space". Note: "The Muslim Students Association and the Coalition for a Military Free Campus hosted a town hall Tuesday night to discuss the ROTC’s potential return to Columbia... although members of the coalition stated that they had heavily advertised the event, attendees were mostly coalition members, along with a handful of other students". Members of the groups criticized the process of the ROTC Task Force. “Discussion was not fostered and people summarized opinion,” Jessie Stoolman, BC ’14, said. “We could ask [the] task force questions, but they didn’t have to answer us. You could email questions, but I am not aware of anyone getting a response.” "Coalition members said that they have had to work hard to inform students about ROTC—by setting up tables on College Walk, for example—in the absence of other sources of information."
30 March 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Senate Considers Removal of ROTC Ballot Measure". Note: Some suggested that the non-binding ballot measure "could be “psychologically harmful” to transgender students who cannot fully participate in ROTC".
30 March 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Why ROTC is Important for Stanford" by Otis Reid. Note: Reid makes the positive arguments for ROTC, focusing in particular on the role of key people in bringing change from within.
30 March 2011 Christian Science Monitor article "ROTC returns to Harvard: Does officer training program need Ivy League?" Note: Many point out the advantages of ROTC at top colleges in reducing the civil-military gap, but Columbia math professor Michael Thaddeus says "The military is the focal point of a lot of debate and criticism in society, and ... we need to be institutionally separate from it in order to criticize it effectively."
31 March 2011 Columbia University Senate draft "Resolution on Columbia University’s Relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States of America". Note: The key wording is "Be it further resolved that Columbia University welcomes the opportunity to explore further mutually beneficial relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps". Note that the final version passed on 1 April differed from this draft.
1 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Final ROTC resolution released, mentions nondiscrimination". Note: Some Senators seek to delay a vote on the draft resolution to 29 April. Eszter Polonyi, a student senator for the Graduate School of Arts and Science, said that there has not been enough debate to proceed to a vote, in part because “the majority of students and faculty are equally clueless on what is going on”. Prof. Jim Applegate said "We have bent over backwards to try to get people involved in this … I firmly believe that the senate has discharged its responsibility to due diligence". The Student Affairs Committee voted 17-5 in favor of sending the resolution to the full Senate, and the senate’s Faculty Affairs Committee also voted to do so.
1 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "Cowardice, Co-optation, and ROTC" by Zachary Warma ‘11 . Note: "What we have witnessed this year is the co-optation and exploitation of Stanford’s political and governmental processes by…two dozen, at most, students looking for a very public political power grab at the expense of ROTC, reasonable discourse and the greater student body. The leadership of SSQL, sympathizers in the “Women’s” Coalition, Stanford Democrats and SOCC has missed an opportunity to foster a productive dialogue on the matter, choosing instead to wage an emotionally charged battle based off of specious claims... Stanford’s educational mission would be failed if the Farm were to churn out America’s “next great leaders” who lack any knowledge or understanding of the armed forces."
1 April 2011 Council of Foreign Relations podcast "ROTC Returns to the Ivy League". Note: Roosevelt Montas, professor and associate dean at Columbia, who co-chaired the school's Task Force on Military Engagement, and Donald Downs, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin discuss issues such as the civil-military gap and the gap between students and Vietnam-era faculty.
1 April 2011 Columbia Spectator blog item "ROTC Resolution passes". Note: The vote was 51-17 in favor of the opening to ROTC. There were "Impassioned remarks from Executive Committee chair Sharyn O’Halloran" and about 20 people outside were "banging drums and chanting".
1 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "USenate Approves ROTC Resolution". Note: The vote count was initially listed incorrectly and then corrected.
1 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "USenate votes to pass ROTC resolution". Note: By a 51-17 vote, "The University Senate has taken a major step towards inviting the ROTC back to Columbia, voting to support the return of the military training program that has been absent from campus for more than 40 years... The resolution’s passage does not guarantee that ROTC will return to Columbia. A branch of the military would need to agree to start a program here, and then [Columbia University President Lee] Bollinger and other administrators would need to negotiate the terms of the program with that branch. Bollinger said he think that “one branch does want to” start a program at Columbia... “This is a powerful, powerful vote here, in my mind,” Bollinger said."
1 April 2011 Columbia University Senate meeting minutes (approved at the next meeting on 29 April).
1 April 2011 Columbia University Senate "Resolution on Columbia University’s Relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States of America". Note: This is the version that passed, with the key wording "Be it Resolved That Columbia University welcomes the opportunity to explore mutually beneficial relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps." Three "resolved" paragraphs from the draft version were removed.
1 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Report From the USenate Meeting". Note: The atmosphere of the meeting and speakers is described. "It went con-pro, and Bwog was reminded of Julius Caesar."
2 April 2011 New York Times article "Decades After Ban, Columbia Opens Door to R.O.T.C. Return". Note: "More than four decades after Columbia University, the heart of the Vietnam-era student movement, banned R.O.T.C. from campus in a moment of 1960s antimilitary rage, the University Senate voted overwhelmingly on Friday to support efforts to bring the group back... the sense of generational turnabout in the Senate vote was not lost on the students of today". Although Harvard and other unversities have made moves to welcome ROTC after the repeal of DADT "For reasons both of history and institutional character, however, none has the importance of Columbia, which was home to a particularly vigorous chapter of Students for a Democratic Society — some of whose most militant members helped to form the left-wing radical group the Weathermen."
2 April 2011 Cub Pub (Columbia Political Union) blog item "ROTC and the Columbia Legacy". Note: "Columbia University has long been associated with its Leftist activism, and its 1969 ban of ROTC has become a symbol of Columbia's positioning on the political spectrum. However, the University Senate resolution on April 1st to remove the ROTC ban was a significant shift for Columbia."
3 April 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Columbia Votes for ROTC Return". Note: "The Columbia decision will likely influence Stanford’s faculty senate decision if the faculty senate is at all worried about public opinion. At this point, a no-vote would elicit from much of the public and conservative media a strong negative comparison between Stanford and other schools."
4 April 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Columbia Senate Supports ROTC". Note: Some expressed concern that Harvard's process for welcoming ROTC was less open than that of Columbia, but Columbia and Harvard graduate Michael Segal pointed to the prospect of an on-campus Naval ROTC unit at Columbia and the history of radicalism at Columbia as factors necessitating a broader process at Columbia. In addition, as mentioned in the ROTC resolution that passed in Columbia's University Senate, "the 1976 Tien Special Committee specifically empowers the University Senate to discuss and decide on any future relationships with the Armed Forces".
4 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "As ROTC scrutinized, military funding ignored". Note: The article discusses military research on campus, and how the original opposition to ROTC, including by former member of Students for a Democratic Society David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98, who is now provost, was based on broad anti-military sentiments. Catherine Lutz, chair of the anthropology department and a member of the committee on ROTC, said military funding of research "leaves other areas of important research — like research into alternative energy and transportation systems or tropical disease — understaffed and underfunded." These examples seem odd, because the US military is taking steps to reduce its need to transport fuel, and faces concerns about tropical diseases far beyond those of US civilians.
5 April 2011 Columbia spectator letter "Columbia shouldn't allow visible acts of militarism" by Herbert J. Gans. Note: An emeritus professor of sociology argues for a ban on military uniforms on campus, "The University should be spared from displays of militarism".
6 April 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Harvard Development Office Had Role in ROTC Funding, Alumni Say". Note: The "Friends of Harvard ROTC Trust" was set up following a 1995 decision by Acting President Albert Carnesale that "A trust separate from the university will be created to receive and disburse contributions made by Harvard alumni or other individuals toward payment of fees associated with Harvard students' participation in ROTC programs at MIT". Despite the passive voice used in the statement, Harvard kept close ties with the fund, with university staff members involved in raising the money from alumni and the donations to the trust counting towards Harvard class gifts.
6 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Senate hears “Opposition to ROTC” bill". Note: Stanford's Undergraduate Senate considered a bill opposing ROTC because of discrimination against transgender people, but instead passed a bill opposing discrimination against transgender people but "not taking a stance" on ROTC.
6 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "Vote Abstain: What It Means and Why It Makes Sense" by John Haskell ‘12. Note: The Chief of Staff of the Stanford student body government argues that the vote on ROTC affects primarily two small communities - students interested in ROTC and transgender students. He argues that people in the majority not affected directly by this matter abstain, since the " minority voice should be able to sit on equal ground as the majority opinion".
6 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "Closing the Citizen-Solider Gulf" by Rebecca Young, M.A. ‘11. Note: The daughter of an Air Force officer writes that when she arrived at Stanford "I was struck that while I understood the nuances of civilian life, my civilian counterparts had virtually no notion of what life in the military entails. Worse, they seemed almost proud of their ignorance... Just as the concept of the citizen-soldier serves to sustain civic engagement and ensure political accountability, the idea of the warrior-scholar serves to provide enlightened military leadership and protect the core values of the population."
6 April 2011 Fox News story "'O'Reilly Factor' Producer Jesse Watters Grills Harvard Students About ROTC Discrimination". Note: The "Harvard students" are 3 of the 5 people shown in the report. Based on finding these people in Harvard square the report concludes that "Sometimes you can be too educated". See Harvard Crimson blog item on 11 April.
7 April 2011 Village Voice article "The Return of ROTC to Columbia". Note: Mark Rudd, one of the student leaders of the 1968 revolt "wonders if perhaps training future officers at Columbia might not be a bad thing after all. “They’ll have been exposed to both liberals and the liberal arts,” he says. “Perhaps they’ll moderate the right-wing officer caste mentality a bit.”" The article also noted that paragrpahs in the draft resolution about the university retaining control of course credits and instructor status were omitted from the final version, but the stated reason for that change was that such control became standing policy of the university as of the point when the Mansfield committee recommendations were adopted, and it was considered redundant to re-state them.
7 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Groups advocate ‘abstain’ on ROTC measure". Note: "John Haskell ’12, a student at the forefront of the movement, said that it is not to be taken to be an anti-ROTC campaign, but rather an option for students who either do not feel educated enough to vote or see the issue as one of civil rights. He said that students on both sides of the issue have joined the effort.“There are lots of reasons that people are abstaining, and it makes the most sense for both sides,” he said."
7 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Harris talk opposes ROTC". Note: David Harris ’67, who was imprisoned for 18 months for dodging the draft, cited opposition to the military as the reason to exclude ROTC. He said "What’s needed here is not better-trained officers; what’s needed here is fewer officers... We can’t keep dealing with the rest of the world through our armies".
7 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "Campaign to Abstain Obscures Student Opinion" by Miles Unterreiner ‘12 . Note: Unterreiner argues that votes to abstain will diminish opposition to ROTC and change the outcome in a way unrelated to the stated view of those proposing abstention as a way of making a statememnt about not voting on rights of others.
7 April 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "An open letter to President Bollinger: Columbia should be free from military affiliation" by Rosalind Morris. Note: An anthropology professor lists a large set of objections to the military, including women not being allowed in some combat roles.
8 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "On ROTC opinions, transgender students vary". Note: Commenting on the transgender issue, Rey Grosz, who identifies as transgender, said "People are just hypocritical and just want something to fight for... I don’t think that they have a right to speak on behalf of the discriminated-against trans population that aren’t allowed in the military. Not letting ROTC people in—I think that’s discrimination". Astronomy professor Jim Applegate "emphasized the clause in the policy which says, “Nothing in this policy shall abridge academic freedom or the University’s educational mission”—a mission that includes educating future military service members as well as civilians about military policy". Gavin McGown said "There’s an interesting parallel between people who say they get looks for walking around in fatigues and me getting looks for walking around in a dress".
8 April 2011 Stanford Daily editorial "To end war and discrimination, bring back ROTC". Note: The editors assume that all ROTC courses would be open to all students, including those ineligible for commissioning. They also assume that the military has no control over its hiring policies, which is not correct - for instance, there are no statutes that specifically bar transgender people from the military. They also claim incorrectly that the military is made up disproportionately of the poor. They point out that keeping the military off campus increases the divide between the country's leaders and soldiers, and argue that this increases the probability of war.
8 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "ROTC – A Call for Inclusion" by Angelina Cardona ’11. Note: The presdent of the Stanford student body says that although having ROTC on campus would be a plus, "bringing back the institution of ROTC in its current form would harm our transgender community" and "demanding a change before allowing the institution to return to campus is one strong lever, amongst others, to changing discriminatory policies". She calls for contacting legislators to get change on the transgender issue, though it is not clear that any laws need to be changed to change the policy. "Once this change is made, I will enthusiastically welcome the return of ROTC to Stanford University."
8 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "ROTC and Women" by Ann Thompson ’11. Note: A Stanford Army ROTC student writes "The six female ROTC cadets and midshipmen at Stanford are baffled by news that the Women’s Coalition (WoCo), a body that claims to represent a wide swath of women’s student organizations, is actively opposing the return of ROTC to campus."
8 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "To those who would seek to prevent the return of ROTC at Stanford" by Dustin Barfield ’12 . Note: A Marine veteran writes "I understand your argument about transgender and disabled persons and the military, and I disagree with it. The argument about disabled persons is particularly weak given the nature of the job done by military personnel. And as for the argument about both groups, I hope that you will also be voting to disallow such groups as the Stanford Cardinal Football team from representing us as well until they allow transgender and disabled persons to compete. And yes, it is very much the same thing, with the exception that in the military, lives are on the line, not points."
8 April 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "The Polarization of the ROTC Debate" by Jack Duane Jr. Note: Arguing for the ROTC ballot referendum, he writes "The Faculty Senate knows that the LGBT community opposes the return of ROTC and they also know that many military affiliated Stanford students are highly supportive of it. What they don’t know, as of now, is how everyone else feels." An accompanying photo shows a poster highlighting President Obama's support for ROTC.
8 April 2011 Eric's Learning Curve blog post "In victory, a warning to Columbia ROTC advocates". Note: "As we continue to work joyfully after the senate vote to help establish ROTC on campus, we must also account for the opposition and defend our gains from invigorated anti-military activists."
9 April 2011 New York Daily News editorial "Having rescinded its perverse ban on the ROTC, Columbia University must now make the return happen".
10 April 2011 New Haven Register op-ed "End this battle: Bring ROTC back to Yale" by Donald Kagan. Note: A Yale professor relates that he taught a course about war because of his "repeated discovery of the disasters wrought by statesmen and generals over the millennia who lacked the necessary training and understanding... It is inexplicable that an elite university would claim to educate leaders for all things — except for national defense... By bringing ROTC to Yale, cadets can benefit from access to an excellent library, distinguished scholars and exposure to well-informed views of military affairs and military history".
11 April 2011 Flyby (Harvard Crimson) blog item "O'Reilly Factor Questions Cantabs About ROTC". Note: discussing the Fox News item, the Crimson notes how strikingly different it was from interviews done by the Harvard Crimson.
11 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Graphical analysis of ASSU election". Note: Supporters of ROTC in the student ballot referendum outnumbered opponents by more than 2 to 1, but almost as many abstained as voted to support ROTC.
11 April 2011 Dartmouth Review article "ROTC Surging on Elite Campuses". Note: "Dartmouth has so far been spared from such divisive controversy, perhaps because its ROTC's status isn't up to question. Like many peer schools, including Columbia and Harvard, Dartmouth banished ROTC from campus during the the Vietnam War. However, unlike many of the same institutions, Dartmouth welcomed ROTC back during the mid 1980s, and reaffirmed its presence in the 90s following the institution of the DADT policy".
12 April 2011 Sudbury Town Crier article "Sudbury man recognized for helping to return Navy ROTC to Harvard University". Note: the role of Paul E. Mawn USN (Ret.) of Sudbury as Chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC is described.
13 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Nearly half of students approve lifting campus ROTC ban". Note: Asked by the Herald "Would you approve of lifting the ban on ROTC?" 43% said yes, 24% said no, and 33% didn't take a stand. Among those with an opinion, 64.4% favored ROTC, compared with 64.5% at Columbia and 72.1% at Stanford.
13 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald op-ed "Students can change the military — by keeping ROTC out" by Julian Park '12. Note: A member of the Coalition Against Special Privileges for ROTC writes that "The military will not change just by throwing in more Brown students" and "Those who seek change, like Ehren Watada or Bradley Manning, are court-martialed."
13 April 2011 Daily Northwestern article "ROTC marches on at NU despite inclusiveness controversy at other private institutions". Note: "Junior Chris Garcia, a resource assistant in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center, said he wishes Obama's new legislation were more inclusive."It's a very difficult problem, and it's very frustrating that trans people aren't in the policy," he said. "I'm assuming that the military will grow in developing a training policy for trans individuals, but I think that will take time.""
13 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Bollinger talks global centers with grad students". Note: "Bollinger asked the students for suggestions for how the administration can help with their concerns, while noting the delicate balance between which decisions involve the community as a whole and which are resolved at the administrative level. He cited the issue of allowing ROTC to return to campus as an example of when issues should be resolved publicly.“I really pushed that into the community,” Bollinger said."
14 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald op-ed "Changing the debate on ROTC — a socialist’s perspective" by Luke Lattanzi-Silveus '14. Note: A member of the International Socialist Organization argues that since DADT had nothing to do with why ROTC was effectively barred from campus in 1969, its repeal should be irrelevant to the return of ROTC. He also claims that the ROTC Vitalization Act of 1964 "required that military instructors be given the status of professor, without the instructors or course material being subject to review by the faculty or any other university body". This is wrong on two counts: the faculty members are subject to review by the university, and the university is not required by the law to give credit for courses it does not consider up to its standards. See letter on 20 April.
14 April 2011 Yale Daily News article "ROTC makes Bulldog Days Bazaar appearance". Note: "Two tables — run by the University of New Haven Army ROTC and the US Air Force ROTC — pitched the ROTC to prefrosh at the invitation of Associate Dean of Yale College William Whobrey, according to Major James Hamma. Hamma said he thought his group was invited because university administration is in talks to bring back ROTC to campus."
15 April 2011 Columbia Political Review article "As the Crow Flies: Normalizing the Poverty Draft through ROTC" by Jacob Shiflett GS'11. Note: A US Army veteran claims that the ROTC resolution was "rushed through the University Senate by special interest groups" without naming any groups. He also asserts that there was not sufficient opportunity for discussion, despite the fact that others at Harvard and Stanford have pointed to the discussion at Columbia and asked why they haven't had such a robust discussion. Shiflett goes on to complain that alumni did not have enough voice in the ROTC debate. Shiflett claims the military uses the GI bill to "solicit the underprivileged for military service", but fails to note that the underprivileged are underrepresented in the military. Furthermore, one of the comments on the article suggests that Shiflett attended Columbia on the GI bill.
19 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "At field training, ROTC cadets prepare for battle". Note: "Choosing ROTC means balancing civilian life with the duties of an officer-in-training. It’s not always easy.“It’s definitely tough,” Brown, a bio-medical engineering major, said. “I just kind of make it happen. You’ve got to use time more efficiently.”" See also photos, reporters discussing their experiences on 21 April and letter on 27 April.
20 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald "Learning to lead: on the ground with ROTC". Note: ""I chose to do ROTC specifically because I did not want to do the academy experience," said Cadet Staff Sergeant and PC junior Amberly Glitz, one of only a handful of female students in the battalion. "I wanted to do some more normal activities in college to kind of have both worlds.""
20 April 2011 Foreign Policy blog item "How to recruit for the Army at Yale?" by Tom Ricks. Note: Ricks suggests some intellectual approaches to recruiting at Yale as well as "Hey, Ivy Leaguers, wanna really freak out your parents? Join the Army!"
21 April 2011 Foreign Policy blog item "The Army should fix the geographical narrowness of its ROTC programs" by Stephen Trynosky. Note: Trynosky details the paucity of ROTC programs in Connecticut and elsewhere in the Northeast.
21 April 2011 Spectrum (Columbia Spectator) blog item "Reporters reflect on their field trip with Columbia ROTC cadets". Note: The students discuss their experience of being embedded with ROTC students to prepare the 19 April Spectator article. "On the bus, I was surprised to hear conversations about topics ranging from literature to psychology. Suddenly, it dawned on me: even though these people appear to be soldiers based on their attire and demeanor, they are still students, just like me."
22 April 2011 Daily Princetonian article "ROTC director Lieutenant Colonel Stark to be deployed to Afghanistan". Note: The new head of Princeton Army ROTC will be Peter Knight. Although the article says that Princeton's ROTC program "is not endorsed by the University", as documented in the comments, the program was set up by an agreement between Princeton and the Army, and Princeton confers "the title, Director of Army Officer Education Program, on the senior Army officer assigned to the Army ROTC detachment, indicating a rank equivalent to the senior academic rank of professor, including the prerogatives and privileges associated with the position of a professor or director as head of a department or program at the institution".
22 April 2011 Dartmouth Now article "Leadership and Service: ROTC at Dartmouth". Note: Although the Army ROTC program is an extension of the program at Norwich University in Vermont, the activities are very much Dartmouth-based. A senior describes his experiences "The group has three hours of physical training per week and group lessons called Military Lab on Friday afternoon. Additionally, I take four hours of classroom instruction per week, though the younger cadets have fewer class hours. It’s all held at Dartmouth, mostly at the Leverone Field House. Twice a year we train with cadets at Norwich University".
22 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Columbia Officially Recognizes Naval ROTC". Note: "Columbia’s Navy and Marine Corps-option midshipmen will participate in Naval ROTC through the NROTC unit hosted at the SUNY Maritime College in Throgs Neck, Queens... The new agreement between the Navy and Columbia will provide that NROTC active duty Navy and Marine Corps officers will be able to meet with Columbia NROTC midshipmen on the Columbia campus in spaces furnished by Columbia."
22 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Committee supports ROTC return". Note: "In a report released today, the ad hoc committee investigating the potential return of ROTC to Stanford announced its support for the program. The report comes in anticipation of the Faculty Senate meeting next Thursday, where the issue will be voted on."
22 April 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Ad Hoc Committee Recommends Return of ROTC". Note: The committee voted unanimously that "The President of Stanford University should invite the U.S. military to reestablish an on-campus ROTC." It also enunciates an ROTC+ vision: "The Stanford ROTC Committee ... will recommend, on a case-by-case basis, whether an instructor be given a lecturer or visiting professor status... The courses in the Stanford-ROTC program may be eligible for either academic or activity course credit, following existing Stanford curriculum review and approval processes. The Stanford ROTC committee should encourage opportunities for Stanford faculty and ROTC instructors to design jointly taught courses that could meet both academic credit standards and ROTC training requirements."
22 April 2011 Stanford Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC report "Towards an on-campus ROTC program at Stanford University". Note: The committee was appointed by the Faculty Senate “to investigate Stanford’s role in preparing students for leadership in the military, including potential relations with ROTC”". It noted that "Stanford University from its inception has had a broadly civic and not merely an academic mission", which includes "some special responsibility to contribute to the success" of the public institutions of the United States and "the American military is one such institution". Discussing remaining objections to ROTC, it stated "Institutional disengagement is an unpromising way of generating the mutual criticism, respect, and understanding that would enable us to do precisely that. For example, the Committee noted that some of the most trenchant arguments that were presented to us against ROTC were marred by naïve and derogatory stereotypes of the American military. Unfortunately, such stereotypes are only to be expected given little contact between the military and our students, faculty, and staff. The increased contact that would likely characterize an on-campus ROTC program will contribute, the Committee believes, in a small but significant way to reducing the perceived gap between the military and civil society in the USA." Regarding suggestions that the culture of the university is too different from the culture of the military, the report writes "Obedience to lawful authority is certainly a part of military roles. But members of the officer corps must be able to do much more than obey orders. They must be capable of nuanced moral decision-making, independent problemsolving, and responsible leadership. Such qualities are intrinsic to the ideal of liberal education." Regarding the WikiLeaks issue, "ROTC students are “discouraged” by the military from reading materials on the WikiLeaks site because in so doing they may undermine their eligibility for future security clearance. But the discouragement is far from unique to ROTC students. Any student considering a career after graduation that would require security clearance would have good reason to avoid academic assignments that focus on classified documents. Yet no one could sensibly say that Stanford should be unwelcoming to all students who are contemplating careers in public service that would require security clearance."
22 April 2011 Stanford University News article "Stanford should invite ROTC back to campus, university committee says". Note: "Ewart Thomas, the committee's chair, will present the report and recommendations to the Faculty Senate at its April 28 meeting... The senate is expected to vote on the recommendations at the Thursday meeting... The April 28 Faculty Senate meeting, which is expected to attract wide interest on campus and from the media, will begin at 3:15 in Room 180 of the Law School."
22 April 2011 Yale University "Report of the Faculty Committee on ROTC". Note: The report recommends resolutions for approval by the Yale faculty that enunciate an ROTC+ vision: "it seems reasonable to state that any course required by a ROTC program that would utilize courses offered and taught by Yale College faculty would be given credit as long as the program met major, distribution, and other degree requirements. Likewise, if a faculty member wished to revise his/her course to accommodate the ROTC Program, such revised courses would likely be acceptable for degree credit as well." The report also notes that in early 2011 "the University Secretary met with representatives of the Air Force to explore the conditions under which the re-establishment of ROTC at Yale might be considered by the military", evoking the pioneering role of Yale students in military aviation.
22 April 2011 Yale Daily News article "ROTC one step closer to returning". Note: "The Faculty Committee on ROTC, which Yale College Dean Mary Miller announced March 29, released its report Thursday recommending that Yale College amend the four resolutions approved by the faculty in 1969, which led to the discontinuation of ROTC at Yale. The new resolutions, on which the faculty will vote at the May 5 faculty meeting, would “untie the hands of the administration” to negotiate ROTC’s return to campus with military officials... The four replacement resolutions call for Yale College to allow ROTC courses to count for credit, grant ROTC instructors faculty ranks based on their credentials, provide need-based financial aid to students who drop out of an ROTC program and provide funding for administrative services, necessary facilities and other program costs."
22 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Following USenate vote, Columbia officially recognizes Navy ROTC program". Note: "Navy spokesperson Tamara Lawrence said that it is not unusual for a school to participate in NROTC through a nearby school with an already-established program. But the agreement will give NROTC a “very visible” presence at Columbia, she added." A Columbia committee "will likely review what sort of academic credit to give to outside NROTC classes and also what on-campus space cadets should be able to use. Lawrence added that active-duty Navy and Marine Corps officers will be able to meet with NROTC cadets on Columbia space in Morningside Heights to receive “mentorship and guidance.”... Columbia had been in discussions with the Navy about ROTC for “over a year.” Bollinger explained that he was initially approached about an NROTC return by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, but emphasized that an agreement was always contingent on the senate review process." On the transgender issue President Bolliunger said “It’s just something that at this stage, all things considered—because the university community was fully aware of this, the Council of Deans was fully aware of this—that itself will not preclude having a relationship [with the military]... Nevertheless, like with other issues, we want to keep working on it.”
22 April 2011 Bay Citizen article "Panel Recommends Returning ROTC to Stanford". Note: "Dr. David Spiegel, the chair of the faculty senate at Stanford University, told the Bay Citizen that he hasn't decided yet how he'll vote... "My read on it is that the sentiment is more in favor than against, but I don't know for sure"".
22 April 2011 On Campus (Columbia University) article "Columbia to Officially Recognize Naval ROTC". Note: "“The University Senate provided an open and transparent process for multiple voices in the Columbia community to be heard on the issue of reinstating ROTC,” said Sharyn O’Halloran, chair of the University Senate and professor of political economy. “The overwhelming final vote reflected a strong consensus that the time has come for Columbia to reestablish relations with the ROTC in ways that both maintain our academic values and allow the University to play a productive role in educating the nation’s next generation of military leaders.”"
23 April 2011 GoLocalProv article "Students and Faculty Oppose ROTC at Brown". Note: A coalition of students, faculty, and community members organized by The Brown Coalition Against Special Privileges for ROTC rallied on Brown University's Main Green. One of the issues they stressed was the Transgender issue, but "Myra Shays, President of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbian and Gays of Greater Providence ... disagrees that reinstating ROTC would undercut Brown's support for the LGBT community."No one at Brown, LGBT or straight is required to join the ROTC. So no one is forced to subject him/herself to discrimination," she said in an email to GoLocalProv. "Some people will be philosophically offended. In the grand scheme of things, this rates far down on my list of worries.""
25 April 2011 Wall Street Journal article "Columbia Allows ROTC to March Back". Note: "Jose Robledo, a Columbia senior and ROTC member who served in the Army for nine years before enrolling... said he heard from two students who were considering attending Columbia in the fall but wanted to be able to participate in ROTC. Both of them decided to enroll, in part because of the rapprochement between the school and the military, he said." Cheryl Miller of the American Enterprise Institute, who plans to release a report this week calling on the military to spend more time and effort setting up ROTC programs in cities like New York and at more elite schools said "You have these kids in New York and cultural competency is a way of life for them."
25 April 2011 Yale Daily News article "Faculty to vote on ROTC rules". Note: "At the May 5 faculty meeting, the faculty will vote on a new set of resolutions, which would remove many obstacles keeping ROTC from campus.“If these resolutions are adopted following the discussion of the faculty, then it clears the way,” Yale College Dean Mary Miller said, adding that she hopes that ROTC will soon return to campus... Miller said the Course of Study Committee would inspect each course to examine whether it fit Yale’s standards, adding that she could not speculate about how many ROTC courses the committee would approve.“We need to really look carefully at the content of the courses,” she said. “There are courses that come by the Course of Study Committee [now] that are sent back for changes or ultimately not approved for credit.”"
25 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Committee supports ROTC return". Note: "The 10-member committee voted unanimously in its supportive recommendation; however, unanimity was not required, according to the committee’s chair, psychology professor Ewart Thomas.“Our recommendation reflects inputs from every committee member; the language was massaged here and there, and it turned out to be possible to write the recommendation in such a way that all on the committee agreed to it,” Thomas wrote in an email to The Daily."
25 April 2011 Stanford Daily column "A Response to the Ad Hoc’s Recommendation for ROTC’s Return" by Cristopher Bautista. Note: Bautista writes "my rights are so unimportant to protect that I’m worth sacrificing for the greater good."
25 April 2011 PBS Newshour segment "At Stanford, Debate Brews Over Reviving ROTC Program on Campus". Note: PBS interviews many of the key voices in the ROTC debate at Stanford, including former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who said "We want the citizens of the country to have something to say and to participate in their army. And we want not just the citizens from the lower ranks of society, but the citizens who are going to the elite colleges."
26 April 2011 Wall Street Journal editorial "ROTC Homecoming: The military is invited back on campus". Note: "After Congress repealed the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the military late last year, one lingering question was whether it would be enough for America's leading universities to invite ROTC back to campus... Well, we're delighted to report that ROTC seems to be returning nationwide... The values of a liberal education are supposed to prepare future leaders—not merely in all fields except national defense—and rebuilding their ties to ROTC is one way for these schools to fulfill the responsibilities that society has entrusted to them."
25 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Conflicting ROTC camps face off". Note: Pro and anti-ROTC rallies took place side by side on the Main Green, with 35 anti and 15 pro. "Each group tried to drown out the other's speeches with music and chants" but there was some discussion between the groups, including over the contention of the anti-ROTC group that "Brown would be less safe if ROTC were again allowed on campus because of the military's record of sexual violence".
27 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "BUCC addresses ROTC, proposed team cuts". Note: At a Brown Community Council meeting, Katherine Bergeron, dean of the College and chair of the Committee on ROTC, said she "spoke with an assistant secretary of the Navy, who is interested in involving the University in a cross-institutional program... This plan would allow Brown students to travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts to participate in their naval ROTC programs because no such programs are currently offered in Rhode Island. ROTC's current arrangement with Providence College would likely remain unchanged. At this point, the committee is not recommending changes to the 1969 resolution, which recognized ROTC programs as extracurricular activities, thereby rendering ROTC courses ineligible for University credit."
27 April 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Forum examines ethics of ROTC". Note: At a Janus Forum Town Hall on the ROTC issue, two spoke in favor and two opposed. Professor of English William Keach argued against ROTC, saying that it's important that a university stand back and observe the military. "For me, it's not a question of aloofness or purity, but a question of engagement ... There are a lot of ways in which the University can learn about and participate in the U.S. military and remain independent and retain its intellectual status."
27 April 2011 GoLocalProv article "Brown Recommends Killing ROTC’s Return". Note: One comment noted "This report is inaccurate—particularly the headline. The Committee established to review the University’s relationship with ROTC has not issued any recommendations and no University action has been taken. What actually transpired at this meeting is that Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, who chairs the Committee to review Brown’s relationship with ROTC, provided a progress report on the Committee’s work to the Brown University Community Council, a body representing the campus community."
27 April 2011 Columbia Spectator letter "An open letter to President Bollinger: ROTC violates Columbia's antidiscrimination policy." Note: 28 members of the department of Anthropology write about the 19 April article on ROTC training, arguing that maneuvers that simulate a battle situation involving "Islamic fundamentalists from the Caucasus" are "discriminatory stereotyping" and therefore violate Columbia's antidiscrimination policy. One comment on the letter, apparently from a recent veteran, adds "Have you ever spoken to an ROTC cadet, a veteran, or soldier? Have you ever observed military training?... The role play scenarios are designed by people who have personally been to the places they attempt to depict and experienced the scenarios they describe. I suggest you do the same. As usual it is YOU who is propagating a discriminatory stereotype. I suggest you get real."
27 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "ROTC at Stanford, Past and Present" by Milton Solorzano ‘07.
28 April 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "Country first, humanity second" by Sam Windley LL.M. ’11. Note: The president of Stanford Says No to War argues that the military not be given special treatment out of a sense of "“civic” mission". He applauds "the brave actions of the military personnel who refused to serve in the Iraq war".
28 April 2011 New York Times "At War" blog item "Stanford Debates R.O.T.C.’s Return" by Tim Hsia. Note: A West Point graduate now studying at Stanford Law School writes "Throughout this academic year, there have been military-themed lecture events. For example, a Military 101 seminar series was started by R.O.T.C. cadets and veterans to share with the greater Stanford community what military service entails. The speakers at these events have been senior active-duty officers from the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Hoover Institution. Furthermore, Stanford is a veteran-friendly campus, with a vibrant veteran community at its graduate schools and a generous Post-9/11 G.I. Bill Yellow Ribbon Program. There are more student veterans on campus — upwards of 50 — than there are R.O.T.C. cadets. Perhaps as a result, the debate here has been civil and thought-provoking."
28 April 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Faculty Senate Votes to Return ROTC (Aborted Live Blog)". Note: Whether ROTC programs restrict a student's major was discussed, and an amendment that all majors be allowed to ROTC students was passed in addition to the vote for ROTC.
29 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "Faculty Senate votes yes on ROTC return". Note: The vote was 28 to 9 with 3 abstentions. "Professor William Perry ’49 M.S. ’55 presented the initial proposal to investigate Stanford’s relationship with the military last year. He reminded the Faculty Senate that they would not be debating ROTC if Congress had not recently repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” “That repeal would not have happened without significant support from senior military officials in the U.S.,” he said. “Their enlightened views are obviously a product of their education. Stanford has the opportunity to help create military leaders that will later make these enlightened decisions. This is the single most important chance you will have to seize that opportunity.” “We can no longer free-ride on the public good known as national security,” added history professor David Kennedy ’63... University general counsel Debra Zumwalt said that formal recognition of ROTC would not violate the nondiscrimination policy as it currently stands. “Our policy prevents against illegal discrimination,” she explained. “Based on all the information we have, we do not see an illegal discrimination and [ROTC] does not violate our policy.”... The Faculty Senate ultimately voted in favor of the committee’s recommendation with three additional amendments, including a condemnation of the military’s discriminatory policies against transgender people. “Our support for reestablishing the ROTC program should not be misconstrued,” read a joint statement released by President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy. “We understand the concerns about the military’s continuing discrimination against transgender people, and we share those concerns. But if the leadership of the military is drawn from communities that teach and practice true tolerance, change is more likely to occur. The U.S. military has demonstrated an ability and willingness to change over time, and we believe Stanford can contribute by providing leaders capable of helping create that change.”"
29 April 2011 Stanford Daily article "In their own words". Note: Some quotes about the ROTC decision: History professor David Kennedy '63 said “I thought it was the University community at nearly its best, taking on a controversial matter and dealing with it in a balanced and judicious way, and I think in the end weighing up all the pros and cons and coming to the right conclusion. The whole Stanford community can give itself a pat on the back for going about this the right way.”
29 April 2011 Stanford Report article "Stanford's Faculty Senate approves process for bringing ROTC back to campus". Note: "Scott Sagan, a professor of political science and a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC, said all ROTC programs require the study of ethics and war. Sagan, co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said he was impressed when he reviewed two textbooks used by the Navy ROTC program at the University of California-Berkeley. He said they covered a wide spectrum of political theory as well as case studies of military crimes, from the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam to the prisoner abuse and torture that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq beginning in 2004." Philosophy professor Kenneth Taylor said "We have a military that's answerable to civilian authority... I think that's a very important thing. We should do our part to educate those people. We are in the business of educating the elite, right? Many of our students have aspirations of being part of the civilian authority that governs the military. We do our darnedest to educate them to be hard-thinking, right-thinking, morally responsible and morally responsive, even though our civilian authority isn't perfect. I don't see why we shouldn't do our darnedest to contribute to the education of the people who will be ultimately answerable to that civilian authority." The full text of the statement by President Hennessy and Provost Etchemendy is also given.
29 April 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Let’s Get the Facts Right on ROTC" by Warner Sallman. Note: A gay member of the pro-ROTC movement discusses the restrictions on transgender people in the military.
29 April 2011 Bloomberg News article "Yale Weighs ROTC Decision as Ivy League Schools Restore Programs". Note: Paul Mawn, chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, said that in order to reach the scale needed for an on-campus ROTC program, some colleges may "have to take a more proactive stance of promoting ROTC, as Harvard has done in the past." "Institutions of higher education should enroll more ROTC students as part of their efforts to increase campus diversity, said Mawn, a retired U.S. Navy captain. More Ivy League colleges can create a positive campus environment for ROTC students by seeking applications from military veterans, as Columbia and Dartmouth have done, he said."
29 April 2011 Spectrums (Columbia Spectator) blog item "Anti-ROTC group protesting right now". Note: Video and audio of the protest outside the first University Senate meeting following the 1 April ROTC vote.
29 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Rage Against the ROTC". Note: About 20 people gathered outside the Law School to protest what they call the “farcical display of democracy by the Senate Task Force on Military Engagement.”
30 April 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed "Our Elite Schools Have Abandoned Military History" by Peter Berkowitz. Note: A senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution writes "too few intellectuals and political decision-makers have served in the military, personally know someone who has, or have studied the history of war. In particular, the failure of our leading universities to teach military affairs impairs the nation's capacity to defend itself and wage war effectively and justly."
May-June 2011 Humanities article "Drew Gilpin Faust, Daughter of the South, President of Harvard". Note: "I felt that Harvard and Harvard students should have connections that would promote this kind of integration of the military with civilian forces and civilian realities. I felt our students would learn a lot, and I felt that it was important for the military as well. I also am very conscious of what General David Petraeus articulated here in a commissioning ceremony for the ROTC cadets a couple of years ago, which is that a soldier’s most important weapon is ideas. And it seems to me very important that the education that Harvard has to offer be something that individuals in the military are able to experience and are encouraged to experience. That was a significant driver in this decision as well."
1 May 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Farewell to unhindered thought: ROTC polarizes the campus, a serious threat to maintaining candor" by Helene Barthelemy. Note: A sophomore majoring in philosophy writes than in order to have "universities as universal havens of free speech, where all nationalities, specialties, social classes, and political ideologies were represented" universities must keep ROTC from being represented.
2 May 2011 Stanford Daily column "Fighting the Good Fight" by Christopher Bautista. Note: Bautista criticizes "the subtle change to the nondiscrimination clause that added the word “unlawful” such that it no longer tolerated just “discrimination” but “unlawful” discrimination". Bautista also notes "The ROTC debate thrust transgender issues to the forefront not only at Stanford but also across the nation — something I could not even imagine two years ago when I was first coming out".
4 May 2011 American Enterprise Institute report "Underserved: A Case Study of ROTC in New York City" by Cheryl Miller. Note: Miller, who manages the Program on American Citizenship at AEI provides the definitive report documenting the shortage of opportunities for ROTC in New York City and how this has negative impacts on the military and on the city.
5 May 2011 Stanford Daily article "Reflections on the ROTC debate and decision" by John Etchemendy. Note: The provost of Stanford writes that "the Senate made its decision based on the value that ROTC would bring to the campus and the belief that Stanford has an obligation to help educate military leaders... Many senators, deeply troubled by the discrimination, were swayed by the hope that as more military leaders are drawn from communities like ours — communities where tolerance and acceptance are the norm — the more quickly any remaining discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity will genuinely cease." See response on 11 May.
5 May 2011 Yale Daily News article "Faculty approve new ROTC resolutions". Note: The faculty approved the resolutions in the 22 April report that allow credit for ROTC courses approved by the Course of Study Committee and grant academic rank to military personnel who teach ROTC courses, according to their credentials.
6 May 2011 Harvard Crimson op-ed "“Don’t Ask” about ROTC?" by Sandra Y. L. Korn and James R. Sares. Note: The authors describe how the process for reconciling with ROTC has been more open at Columbia, Yale and Stanford than the process at Harvard, and that "the Harvard community still knows little about the process of negotiations or the terms of the deal". They also note that "Harvard’s anti-discrimination policy promises to protect members of our community from discrimination based on “gender identity.”" but don't mention that the policy refers only to discrimination that is "unrelated to course requirements" as discussed on the Transgender issues page.
9 May 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Due to Ban, Trans Man at Harvard Law School Cannot Serve in U.S. Military". Note: Jack K., a vereran who served as a female and now is a Harvard Law School student who would like to serve as a JAG as a male, said of the 4 March 2011 Harvard-Navy signing ceremony "It was incredibly difficult as a vet to stand by the sidelines and watch service members in uniform and ROTC cadets take pride in that moment." The comments section has an extensive discussion of the transgender issue.
9 May 2011 Daily Princetonian article "DADT repeal does not change University's ROTC policy". Note: The "University administration does not appear to have been influenced by the DADT repeal and has yet to make any move toward formally recognizing the program as a University-endorsed organization."
11 May 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Year in Review: After 43-year absence, Columbia recognizes ROTC". Note: The article says "Columbia will give NROTC midshipmen academic credit for their work" but it is not clear that will be the case for all or even some courses.
11 May 2011 Stanford Daily op-ed "ROTC — Provost Etchemendy, Open, Not Close The Doors To Dissent!" by Jonathan Poto '13. Note: Responding to Etchemendy's 5 May op-ed, Poto calls upon him to "do more to show respect for the gravity of the issue". However, Poto expresses skepticism that the Stanford community will have any effect on the ability of transgender people to serve in the military in the future, and does not call upon the provost to take any particular action to make the case to the military that some transgender people should be allowed to serve in the military.
11 May 2011 Statement Before the Subcommittee on Personnel of the Senate Armed Services Committee by Juan M. Garcia, Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Manpower and Reserve Affairs), Vice Admiral Mark E. Furgusson III, Chief of Navy Personnel, and Lieutenant General Robert E. Milstead Jr., Deputy Commandant for Manpower & Reserve Affairs, United States Marine Corps. Note: The officials testify "we are expanding the number of ROTC units to ensure that the officer ranks are open to young men and women from all segments and all regions of the country. Our two newest host programs at Arizona State and Rutgers Universities reach geographic areas not previously covered, and are at large schools with recognized technical and engineering programs. At the same time, the anticipated repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is providing the opportunity to expand ROTC participation at various Ivy League schools... The Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) program has 60 units located at 73 host institutions with 86 cross-town institution agreements. Of the total 159 NROTC affiliated colleges and universities, 16 schools rank in the top 25 of U.S. News and World Report’s Best National Universities of 2011, including three Ivy League affiliations."
12 May 2011 Inside Higher Ed op-ed "After ROTC's Return" by Jonathan Hillman. Note: The chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC calls on the military and the universities to engage with each other. "Fewer places are better than the classroom for building civil-military bonds. When possible, faculty should collaborate with ROTC instructors. Imagine how an East Asian politics class might benefit from the experience of a naval officer who has been deployed throughout the region. Knowing only about the military as a fighting force, many students will be surprised by the intellectual firepower wielded by America’s men and women in uniform."
17 May 2011 Barnard College "Alumnae in the Military: Katherine Diefenbach '04". Note: Diefenbach joined Army ROTC after 9/11 and has served in both Iraq and the White House.
17 May 2011 Barnard College "Alumnae in the Military: Natalie Lopez-Barnard '10". Note: Lopez-Barnard did Army ROTC and said " I was drawn to sports psychology and helping people in stressful positions, which eventually led me to think about using my education in psychology to help enhance combat performance".
23 May 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Before the Military's Estrangement, ROTC Members Do Their Part". Note: "At a time when financial aid was not prevalent, a number of participants in ROTC received scholarships from the military. Some, like John R. Verani ’61, received money that covered their entire tuition, plus room and board. He says that when he agreed to serve four years in the Navy, the financial aid he received allowed him to go to Harvard, as his parents could not have afforded the tuition.“It was an opportunity for me to have a Harvard education in exchange for the commitment,” he says. Other students received funding only to pay for the extra ROTC courses they took."
24 May 2011 Harvard Gazette article "Harvard in the military: Recent ROTC grads have trained, traveled, and seen combat". Note: The article profiles recent graduates now serving in the military. Among them, Shawna Sinnott ’10 is now an intelligence officer, “where I will be directly applying the knowledge I gained at Harvard through my special concentration in ‘Understanding Terrorism... Nowhere else would I have been able to create such an interdisciplinary concentration, learning from experts in every academic field. With this basis, I am much more confident in how I will be able to approach the threat and aggressively address it.”
25 May 2011 Harvard ROTC Commissioning Ceremony.
25 May 2011 Remarks at the Harvard ROTC Commissioning Ceremony by MG James McConville.
25 May 2011 Harvard Gazette article "Officers of the day: Three commissioned in ROTC ceremony". Note: Incoming commander of the 101st Airborne Division Major General James McConville "praised the new officers for taking “a path of service different than your peers,” and called the commissioning ceremony “the defining moment in your life.”"
25 May 2011 Yale Daily News article "Levin to hold press conference with Secretary of the Navy tomorrow". Note: Yale's president "Levin declined to comment on tomorrow's announcement and whether it relates to the University's negotiations with the military to bring a unit of the Reserve Officer's Training Corps back to campus".
25 May 2011 Associated Press article "Navy, Columbia to sign pact in shipboard ceremony lifting university’s 42-year-old ROTC ban". Note: "Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and university president Lee C. Bollinger will sign the agreement aboard the USS Iwo Jima as part of New York’s annual Fleet Week on Thursday... Under the agreement, the Navy will have an office in the university’s campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Recruits will train at the State University of New York’s Maritime College in the Bronx".
25 May 2011 Harvard Magazine article “Harvard Soldier Scholars”. Note: The article includes audio and text of President Faust's remarks at the ROTC Commissioning Ceremony.
26 May 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Harvard ROTC Commissions Three Officers". Note: "Though the speakers made little mention of the return of Harvard’s ROTC program—choosing instead to focus on the accomplishments of the men being honored—Faust hinted at the renewed relationship between Harvard and the armed forces.“I hope that your place in a long and now fully-invigorated Harvard tradition of military service and sacrifice supports and inspires you in the months and years to come,” Faust said, speaking in front of a crowd that spanned the front row sections of Tercentenary Theatre."
26 May 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Soldiers and Students". Note: The article describes the atmosphere at the time ROTC was effectively barred from Harvard in 1969, and how the atmosphere shifted in the early 1990s from an antimilitary one to concerns about the right of gays to serve, which Advocates for Harvard ROTC member Michael Segal described as a "patriotic cause".
26 May 2011 Harvard Crimson editorial "Welcoming back ROTC". Note: The editors agree with the pro-ROTC dissenting opinion of a minority of the editors in 1968, and commends President Faust for restoring official recognition of ROTC. The editors write that "there can be no better context for an ROTC education than within Harvard’s curriculum and values. It is here that the complexities of moral philosophy, modern politics, and military instruction can be put into dialogue in the grand humanistic tradition of America’s greatest university. Students and teachers of all disciplines and political persuasions challenge and edify each other, and we are confident that the fruits of their considered conversations will redound to the benefit of our nation." Noting the transgender issue, the editors write "In the spirit of the Edmund Burke, who famously wrote that no one “makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could only do a little,” Harvard should recognize ROTC in the attempt to reform from within a system with a major institutional flaw. We would all benefit from a more tolerant military, and, in true Burkean fashion, recognizing ROTC—rather than rejecting it—seems the most promising route to accomplishing that necessary goal at this point in time."
26 May 2011 Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps Cross-enrollment Agreement Among Columbia University, the State University of New York Maritime College and the Department of the Navy. Note: "Columbia shall consider, through its faculty Committee on Instruction, awarding credit for graduation from Columbia for NROTC courses, applying the same standards that it applies to other Columbia courses... Columbia shall record all NROTC courses taken by its Students at SUNY Maritime on the Student's official transcript, whether or not it grants academic credit for such courses."
26 May 2011 Columbia University On Campus article "Navy and Columbia Sign NROTC Agreement". Note: "University Provost Claude M. Steele will establish a committee of faculty, students and administrators to oversee implementation of the ROTC program consistent with Columbia’s academic standards and policies of nondiscrimination.". The article includes video of the signing of the agreement.
26 May 2011 remarks by Yale president Richard Levin "Yale and U.S. Navy ROTC Signing". Note: "Like all agencies of the federal government, the Navy is under pressure to contain spending, including expenditures for training of new officers. Opening and sustaining an ROTC unit is expensive, and the number of cadets completing ROTC already exceeds the number of new Officers who are commissioned each year. From a purely quantitative perspective, the Navy has no need to open new detachments. For that reason I applaud the Secretary and his colleagues for recognizing that re-establishing Naval ROTC at Yale is not strictly about numbers. It is about tapping a deep pool of talent at Yale to find officers who will make distinctive contributions to the Navy and the country."
26 May 2011 Associated Press article "Yale announces return of ROTC after 4 decades". Note: "The ROTC unit at Yale will be the Navy's only ROTC unit in Connecticut. The Yale unit's first class of ROTC midshipmen will enter in the fall of 2012. In addition to Yale students, the unit will enroll students from other public and private universities in the state that participate under crosstown arrangements."
26 May 2011 Yale Daily News article "Levin signs ROTC agreement with U.S. Secretary of the Navy". Note: "Interested students will no longer have to travel away from campus to attend ROTC classes, a marked difference from the ROTC chapters recently introduced at Yale's peer institutions. Yale’s branch will also become available to students from other college and universities in Connecticut, and will welcome them to take ROTC instruction under cross-enrollment arrangements."
26 May 2011 NY1 story "Columbia University Signs ROTC Agreement". Note: “The Columbia campus was a front in the culture wars, if you will,” said Dan McSweeney, a Columbia alumnus who serves in the armed forces. “And for this to be happening means some level of resolution is occurring.”
26 May 2011 "Columbia University NROTC Proclamation" by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. Note: In his remarks on the "re-establishment of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Unit to Columbia University after an absence of 40 years" Secretary Mabus said "Renewal of this formal relationship though will serve to bring a whole lot of new and talented officers into the Navy and Marine Corps every year, and the presence of NROTC will enrich and strengthen both services and the educational experience of all students".
26 May 2011 "Ceremonial Remarks at the Signing of Naval ROTC Agreement" by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. Note: President Bollinger notes how Columbia's course on “War Aims” during World War I developed into the Core Curriculum and said "Columbia will be an even more valuable forum for enhancing the relationship between our military and civil society in the years ahead".
26 May 2011 Yale Daily News article "New Naval ROTC unit to draw students from across state". Note: "Engineering professor Gary Haller, who chaired [the ROTC] faculty committee, said in a Thursday interview that the return of a Naval ROTC unit — instead of a unit representing a different branch — to Yale exceeded his personal expectations.“I would hope because of the kinds of officers that the Navy is interested in, they might develop programs that take advantage of [Yale’s] courses in the science and engineering,” Haller said... The Yale NROTC unit will enter a partnership with the unit at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts to share staff and other resources."
27 May 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Bollinger signs NROTC agreement with Navy Secretary". Note: President Bollinger said "This offers a new era of a great relationship between universities like ours and armed forces... We are rebuilding that relationship." Secretary Mabus said "Having Navy and Marine officers on campus will give Columbia University students a chance to interact with the military in a way they hadn’t before... And this will give ROTC members a much greater opportunity in terms of what they can learn." The statement in the article that "cadets will earn Columbia credit for their work" is likely to refer to the possibility of credit for particular courses if authorized by Columbia's Committee on Instruction.
30 May 2011 Providence Journal op-ed "It’s past time to bring ROTC back to Brown" by Jonathan Hillman. Note: The chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC writes that since repeal of DADT "Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia — peer institutions that also broke with the military during Vietnam — have already opened their doors to ROTC. Meanwhile, Brown has only taken the tentative step of forming a committee to study the issue.... ROTC was not even on the Brown Corporation’s meeting agenda on Friday — its last such meeting until October. Among the Ivies without ROTC programs, only Brown has yet to make its intentions clear."
1 June 2011 The Dartmouth article "College ROTC remains unchanged". Note: There is talk of expanding the number of ROTC students at Dartmouth and that College President Jim Yong Kim has been very supportive about helping ROTC find a more central location on campus.
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."
1 June 2011 Yale Daily News op-ed "ROTC’s Back. What next?" by James Campbell. Note: The head of the Yale College Council ROTC committee argues that on-campus ROTC will not in itself increase enrollment, based on the experience of opening last year of an Army ROTC option for Yale students at nearby University of New Haven. He calls for an ROTC+ model: "Yale can and should build a framework around future ROTC programs. We have the opportunity to make Yale a premier destination for the study of both civilian and military leadership — not only for the benefit of ROTC students in southern Connecticut, but for the academic community at-large. These are things we should be excited about."
2 June 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Yale Will Get ROTC Unit on Campus". Note: The article observes that Yale getting an on-campus ROTC unit “one-ups” Harvard, but notes that the avaiability of MIT as a nearby host institution for Harvard accounts for the difference.
8 June 2011 New York Post op-ed "ROTC's NYC boycott" by Cheryl Miller. Note: Miller says that requiring Columbia ROTC students to commute one hour back and forth to the Bronx for Naval ROTC will reduce participation, and calls on the military to invest more in Manhattan. "Fordham University's Army ROTC program almost closed in 2000. Then it got an energetic new instructor -- a native New Yorker and Fordham ROTC graduate -- who opened classes at the school's Lincoln Center campus and began recruiting aggressively at outside campuses. Fordham Army ROTC went from the bottom of the pack to the top 15 percent of ROTC units nationwide."
8 June 2011 New York Times blog item "R.O.T.C. Returns to Yale and a Soldier Applauds" by Adrian Bonenberger. Note: During the 40 years in which ROTC was absent from many Ivy colleges "the armed services lost out on a great number of highly disciplined, motivated, intellectual and highly talented people who might have made great officers. The 10 or so Ivy Leaguers I’ve encountered over the last seven years in uniform all shared (regardless of their political or religious orientation) a desire to examine and talk through ideas and problems — skills that serve military leaders well." Amd for the universities, "shutting out R.O.T.C. helped create an “us and them” mentality between the Ivy League and the military, reducing the opportunity for meaningful dialogue over war in the classroom and in the dining halls."
20 June 2011 Eric's Learning curve blog post "Suggestions for Columbia ROTC". Note: Suggestions for the designers and builders of Columbia ROTC.
30 June 2011 New York Post article "Chuck in plea over ROTC". Note: "Sen. Charles Schumer yesterday urged the Navy to provide on-campus military training to help relaunch its ROTC program at Columbia University to save students in the program from having to travel to The Bronx for drills.... Schumer said students who want to enroll in ROTC have to travel to SUNY Maritime in The Bronx to fulfill their military-training requirements, a two-hour trek that will discourage some from enrolling."
27 July 2011 The Best Defense blog item "Dempsey on two big lessons of Iraq: Think more and train leaders better". Note: The nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said "I've been scarred by rereading a quote from Einstein, who said if you have an hour to save the world, spend 55 minutes of it understanding the problem and five minutes of it trying to solve it. And I think sometimes, in particular as a military culture, we don't have that ratio right. We tend to spend 55 minutes trying to -- how to solve the problem and five minutes understanding it. That's one of the big lessons for me in developing leaders for the future, not only in the Army but, if confirmed, in the joint force."
3 August 2011 USA Today article "ROTCs return to Ivy League". Note: "In 2010, only 54 students from the Ivy League schools were commissioned through ROTC programs, about 1% of the total students commissioned that year, according to the Pentagon. That was down from 123 in 1993, or about 2%... The number of Navy ROTC midshipmen enrolled in Ivy League schools was 62 last fall, down from 130 in 2005, according to the Navy." Describing the atmosphere before the thaw this year between elite colleges and ROTC, Paul Mawn, Chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, said "These cadets and midshipmen have been treated by Harvard as if they were members of a banned fraternity". Referring to attempts to evoke against ROTC the arguments of the Vietnam war protest movement, Peter Awn, dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia, said "The argument had almost no traction... "I think they were stunned by that."
3 August 2011 Brown University Memo from the minority on the ROTC Committee. Note: A minority of the committee urged the university not to see to expand cross-institutional ROTC opportunities, and their memo was released to the public following a 5 October 2011 faculty meeting. They cite Deaprtment of Defense regulations excluding transgender people from the military as conflicting with Brown's antidiscrimination policy.
2011 The Forum article "The Pendulum Swings: The Fall and Return of ROTC to Elite Campuses, and Why It Matters" by Prof. Donald Downs. Note: Downs, who was present for many of the ROTC events at Columbia and interviewed many of the key figures, notes that "In a very real respect, the politics of ROTC at Columbia represented a dialectical struggle to reintroduce and re-legitimate a military perspective in the broad marketplace of campus ideas" and that ROTC "reflected a stretching of the university mind to embrace a set of perspectives and values that lie outside the horizons of most campus citizens these days, such as military conceptions of duty, patriotism, and the use of force in justifiable circumstances". He describes the parallels between the efforts for acceptance of gays and acceptance of ROTC, and how these came together at Columbia. Downs also relates that in January 2011, high-level ROTC officials began making contact with Columbia president Lee Bollinger.
6 September 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Everything You Need to Know About ROTC At Columbia". Note: BWOG brings new students up to date on the ROTC issue, illustrating the broad themes but leaving the impression that DADT was a policy of the military instead of the law and that the 2008 vote at Columbia was marred by significant fraud.
7 September 2011 Brown Committee on the ROTC report "Brown and the Reserve Officers Training Corps: Past, Present, and Future". Note: A majority of the committee "recommends that the President engage in conversations with the Department of Defense to learn how Brown students might participate in Naval or Air Force ROTC programs currently unavailable to them, and to bring any proposal she might make regarding the expansion of ROTC opportunities back to the Faculty." The report also notes that "In 1862, the acceptance of Morrill land-grant funds mandated that the college offer military instruction". The committee contacted the Navy and learned "the Navy would indeed be interested in re-establishing a relationship with Brown, but the high cost of creating a new NROTC detachment makes it unlikely that the Navy would want to create an on-campus program at Brown anytime soon. The preferred solution might involve some kind of crossinstitutional partnership with an existing Naval ROTC unit".
7 September 2011 talk by Paul Mawn at Military Order of the World Wars "Harvard and ROTC: A Current Sitrep". Note: The Chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC looks beyond the Harvard-Navy announcement to steps needed for Harvard and the military to work together, both in the short-term through the MIT hosting of ROTC, and in the long run with possible Harvard hosting.
8 September 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "ROTC committee issues final report: Fate of program’s 40-year ban from campus remains unclear". Note: Katherine Bergeron, Dean of Brown College, said that the recommendation in the report that the university president enter into discussions with the military was supported by a "small majority" of the committee. "Joshua Posner '71 ... was a student activist on campus during the Vietnam era and supported the effort to remove ROTC in protest of the war. He said the movement to end ROTC programs on campus in the late 1960s was largely a symbolic gesture in protest of the war rather than a strict opposition to the ROTC program specifically. "We opposed ROTC and effectively campaigned to have it thrown off campus as a protest during the anti-war period," he said. Posner said that today, Brown needs to be "fully engaged with the rest of the nation," and that not allowing ROTC on campus "contributes to the extreme stratification that is so much at the core of what's wrong with this country," citing the military's cultural and socioeconomic diversity."
9 September 2011 New Haven Register article "ROTC changes afoot at Yale University in New Haven". Note: "Yale University, which has been talking with the Air Force about a Reserve Officers’ Training Program, will have an announcement on it" on 12 September.
12 September 2011 Yale University press release "United States Air Force announces new ROTC detachment at Yale". Note: Yale announced signing of an agreement for an Air Force ROTC unit to begin at Yale in the fall of 2012. It will include students from other local colleges as well. The article describes Yale's history with the military, but leaves out one of the more remarkable parts, how in 1916 a group of Yale undergraduates organized an aerial defense unit with little help from the Navy. After the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Navy made the young aviators commissioned officers and many went on to very distinguished careers, including in the Pentagon
12 September 2011 Speech by Yale president Richard C. Levin "Air Force ROTC Signing Ceremony". Note: Signing the Air Force ROTC agreement, he said "As a partnership uniting the Armed Services and the nation's universities, ROTC enables the military to identify officer candidates who bring a breadth of perspectives to national service." Alluding to national manpower cutbacks, he said "I commend Secretary Donley, General Rice and General Peck for seeing the big picture, and for seeing the importance, even in difficult financial times, of making it easier for future officers to get the benefit of a Yale education."
12 September 2011 Fox News article "Yale brings back Air Force ROTC after long absence". Note: "Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said at a signing ceremony that a presence on campus will make it easier for the Air Force to engage with some of the brightest students in America and provide the Yale community with an everyday example of service members who defend the country. "It will be a reminder that while the United States military's all-volunteer force remains one of our nation's strengths, this strength depends upon broad participation by its citizens — participation that includes fellow Yale colleagues and must include men and women from every part of America." Donley noted that several of the Air Force's earliest civilian leaders were Yale graduates. He said other prominent Yale graduates who served in the Air Force include former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, former U.S. Ambassador to China Clark Randt and former President George W. Bush."
13 September 2011 Yale Daily News article "Yale to welcome Air Force ROTC". Note: In covering the announcement about Yale's Air Force ROTC unit, the article notes that Yale's Air Force ROTC unit had closed in 1957, before the Vietnam-era unrest that resulted in ROTC being barred from many elite colleges.
15 September 2011 Inside Higher Ed article "Not Marching in Step". Note: "Brown is the last Ivy League holdout on the ROTC expansion issue. Harvard, Yale and Columbia Universities all approved the reintroduction of similar programs with little controversy earlier this year. Others never kicked ROTC off campus". The article refers to "the federal law barring transgender individuals from serving in the military", while in fact the policy on transgender people is a military regulation, not a law, and discussed as so in the report of Brown's ROTC committee.
Fall 2011 Columbia College Today letters "Return of ROTC". Note: Two alumni protest the return of ROTC and one celebrates it.
19 September 2011 Brown Daily Herald column "ROTC expansion threatens the integrity of our community" by Julian Park '12. Note: Park claims that because of the Solomon amendment "Brown's relationship with Providence College — where our students participate in Army ROTC — has kept us funded" and "As a footnote in the report mentions, one member of the committee cautioned that "if the University were to expand its current relationship with ROTC, any decision to reduce that relationship at a later date would violate the Solomon Amendment."". This is wrong. If Brown prohibits ROTC on campus and allows its students to do ROTC elsewhere, it is in violation of the Solomon Amendment, which states that no funds may be provided "if the Secretary of Defense determines that that institution ... has a policy or practice ... that either prohibits, or in effect prevents ... the Secretary of a military department from maintaining, establishing, or operating a unit of the Senior Reserve Officer Training Corps ... at that institution." The only factor that has prevented Brown from being cited for violation of the Solomon amendment is that the Secretary of Defense has chosen not to invoke the Amendment despite Brown's policy. For more details, see this Solomon Amendment issues page.
19 September 2011 Harvard video "U.S. Navy Captain Curtis R. Stevens, Midshipman 1st class Evan Roth '12, and Midshipman 3rd class Catherine Philbin '14 discuss the demands and rewards of life in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at Harvard University."
20 September 2011 The Day article "Training program seen as 'turning point' for partnership with Navy". Note: "ROTC at Yale is a way to make sure graduates don't miss out on future leadership positions, the dean of Yale College said Monday. "We have not had an easy and obvious route for our students who seek to serve their nation at the very highest levels," said Mary Miller, dean of Yale's undergraduate program. "And we want to make sure that it is one of the categories that our students consider." ... Rear Adm. Richard P. Breckenridge said "he expected some engineering students from Yale will want to learn about submarine technology. These students, he said, are highly sought after by corporations."
20 September 2011 WBUR item "ROTC Returns To Harvard Campus". Note: "Harvard President Drew Faust said the real change will be in the program’s visibility, with a director and office on campus.“That office will be in a building that houses many undergraduate activities and so students will see it, have access to it and the presence of the military on campus will be evident to them,” Faust said. The school will also start taking direct financial responsibility for the costs of the program, which have previously been covered by alumni donations. For now, the agreement extends only to the Naval ROTC, but Faust said Harvard is talking with other branches about their possible return to campus."
20 September 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Harvard Officially Welcomes ROTC: Naval ROTC office's opening is first concrete step in renewed relationship". Note: "A ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday afternoon celebrated the opening of a satellite office for the Navy on Harvard’s campus... The newly created Naval ROTC office will be housed on the second floor of the Student Organization Center at Hilles and will seek to support cadets on campus."
20 September 2011 Harvard Gazette article "Opening day: Campus office for Naval ROTC is first in 40 years". Note: "Harvard-ROTC implementation committee co-chair Kevin Kit Parker, an Army major, could not attend. He is now on his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan."
21 September 2011 Boston Globe article "ROTC back at Harvard after 40 years: Navy is first branch to have privileges restored". Note: "“To use a military analogy, I think this is a very important beachhead,’’ said Paul E. Mawn, a retired Navy captain and 1963 Harvard graduate. “But as far I’m concerned, the mission is not accomplished.’’... Mawn, who also heads the group Advocates for Harvard ROTC, said he would not be satisfied until the school had a robust military presence with scholarships targeted at veterans and more programs encouraging students to enlist." See video here.
21 September 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Hopes High for More Cadets with Return of NROTC". Note: Harvard is working on improving the logistics of transportation to ROTC classes at MIT.
21 September 2011 Harvard Gazette article "Of brass and khakis: Harvard students learn military life, on land, sea, and in air". Note: "Sebastian Raul Saldivar of Dallas was one of the Harvard freshmen who took the oath on Aug. 21. “I remember watching 9/11 unfold in a third-grade class,” Saldivar explained as his main inspiration to serve. “I saw innocent and helpless men and women attacked. I knew I wanted to protect. I saw so many Americans unite to help, I knew I wanted to serve.”"
27 September 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Truth About Who Fights for Us: In 2007, only 11% of enlisted military recruits came from the poorest U.S. neighborhoods" by Ann Marlowe. Note: Marlowe notes how ROTC is crucial in maintaining the participation in the military of people from high income households.
30 September 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Vet population likely to decrease due to new GI Bill cuts". Note: In discussing an expected fall in veterans at Columbia due to a new law capping GI Bill veterans' benefits, "University Senator Jose Robledo, GS and a veteran, added that during the ROTC debates last school year, there were “high-minded academics and left-wing radicals” who pushed forth their concerns with ROTC, but that veterans at Columbia helped moderate the conversation."
1 October 2011 Providence Journal op-ed "Brown should follow peers, welcome ROTC" by Jonathan Hillman. Note: Referring to Brown's Committee on ROTC, Hillman writes "President Simmons can right the committee’s wrong when she delivers her final report to the Brown Corporation (the university’s governing body) next month. Rather than beginning with the committee’s muddled recommendations, she can offer a clear choice: Either ROTC is compatible with Brown’s mission, or it is not."
19 October 2011 Brown University Letter from President Ruth Simmons about the report of the ROTC committee. Note: President Simmons recommended affirming Brown's 1969 faculty resolution not to give any academic appointments to ROTC faculty, effectively barring on-campus ROTC due to provisions of the ROTC Vitalization Act of 1964. In contrast, other Ivy colleges have created special visiting professor or "Directory of ROTC" faculty positions to meet the requirements of the law. She urged discussion with the Department of Defense about expanding "cross-institutional" ROTC opportunities for Brown students at other colleges. She also called for Brown to work for inclusion of transgender people in the military.
19 October 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Simmons: No change to campus ROTC ban". Note: President Simmons recommended expanding "cross-institutional" ROTC opportunities. "Currently, no institutions in Rhode Island provide Naval or Air Force ROTC programs, but Simmons said there is a nearby college currently exploring these options. Should one of these programs be approved, Brown could then pursue a partnership, Simmons said."
19 October 2011 Inside Higher Ed article "Falling (Partway) In Line". Note: Jonathan Hillman, chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC, notes that not only is Brown not acting as a follower by belatedly following other Ivy colleges in making movements towards ROTC, but it has staked out the least ROTC friendly position of the Ivies.
20 October 2011 Brown Daily Herald editorial "A plea for ROTC’s reinstatement". Note: Brown's student newspaper urges the university to ask for on-campus ROTC, not just cross-institutional ROTC opportunities.
20 October 2011 Brown Daily Herald letter "Simmons misses opportunity on ROTC" by Jonathan Hillman '09. Note: The chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC notes that Brown has taken the least welcoming position towards ROTC of all the Ivy universities.
20 October 2011 Boston Globe article "College resists a return to ROTC: Brown keeps policy from Vietnam era". Note: "Katherine Bergeron, Brown’s most prominent dean, said she expected the school’s board of trustees to ratify the decision by the end of its annual meeting Saturday." Phil O’Brien, a Navy veteran who graduated from Brown in 1956, said "The university has lost its way and taken a cowardly position that is offensive and contrary to its own mission statement". Jonathan Hillman, chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC, noted that "They could have hosted Naval ROTC in the Ocean State".
22 October 2011 Boston Globe editorial "Brown should allow ROTC on campus". Note: "President Ruth Simmons, in explaining the committee’s position, pointed to the military’s ban on transgender recruits, its hierarchical command structure, as well as “recent wars undertaken by the country.’’ Yet those policies are set largely by civilians in Congress and the White House, not the military... This post-Vietnam rift between Pentagon and ivory tower has damaged both the military and the country. The military needs well-educated soldiers, sailors, and Air Force officers to meet the complex demands of modern warfare. And the country needs to get past the cultural divide that has politicized military service and risks turning the armed forces into regional institutions, with service members clustered in the South and Southwest. Bridging that divide has clear benefits - even amid understandable concerns about discrimination against transgender people, a minority who nonetheless deserve equal treatment. Faculty and students are right to advocate for their transgender peers. But a failure to acknowledge the military’s acceptance of Congress’s repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ would send the wrong message. It would indicate that even major steps by the military won’t lessen the atmosphere of distrust." See letters in response here and here and responses to those letters here.
22 October 2011 Harvard ROTC Aviation Award 2011. Note: Harvard Navy ROTC graduate James Reach '11 took two flights in vintage east-block aircraft as winner of the 2011 Harvard ROTC Aviation Award.
25 October 2011 Boston Globe article "Fed false logic, campus eats up a hoax and revolts". Note: At Smith College a logic course carries out an annual hoax, in which students argue for or against an issue presented as erupting on campus. One year, there was a "supposed grass-roots attempt to start an ROTC program. Most of the campus didn’t fall for that one, but the president, Carol Christ, did. “It was my first year, and I was just about to meet with the board of trustees,’’ she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, how am I supposed to handle this?’’’"
25 October 2011 Columbia Spectator article "As provost ﬁnalizes NROTC committee, student senators call for transparency". Note: "A University statement announcing the agreement with the Navy in April said that students, faculty, and administrators would serve on the committee. But according to someone involved in the ROTC discussions—who asked not to be named because discussions about the committee have not been public—there were no plans to put a student on the committee as recently as a few days ago, and a student member was added only after students put pressure on the provost’s office."
27 October 2011 Harvard Gazette article "A Harvard perspective on military service". Note: The Office of Career Services just published “After Harvard: Considering Military Service,” its newest informational guide... The 20-page guide was written by three members of Crimson Serves, a nonprofit group run by veterans currently at Harvard". One of the authors said “The fact that it’s on the wall next to the investment banking and consulting brochures.. gives this career path a level of visibility and a level of legitimacy I don’t think it had in the past."
28 October 2011 Providence Journal op-ed "Brown moves toward accepting ROTC" by Anne Neal. Note: The president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni applauds a decision by Brown University's trustees to open "an office on campus to assist veterans and students interested in ROTC". She urges the trustees to overcome faculty objections to associations with ROTC using frameworks that have proven acceptable at other top colleges.
29 October 2011 Providence Journal letter "Brown, ROTC, transgender" by Jonathan Hillman. Note: The chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC writes "Having fought hard for the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," Brown's peers opened their campuses not as a full-hearted embrace of the military and all its policies, but as a sign of good faith in an on-going process. By contrast, Brown's leadership appears to be demanding that the military remake itself in Brown's image before it even sits down at the same table."
7 November 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "One percent express interest in off-campus ROTC". Note: Quantitating the effect of ROTC on campus versus off campus, "Seven percent indicated they would be interested in joining a ROTC program only if it were offered at Brown's campus, and 1 percent reported they would be interested in another institution's program." The numbers were higher for men. See letter on 16 November.
7 November 2011 Harvard Crimson editorial "Saluting the Military". Note: "the Office of Career Services hosted a panel on careers in the military. Graduate students who had served in the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, and Air Force spoke to current students, fellow military alumni, and military policy experts. The popularity of this event attests to the military’s heightened role on campus, after President Drew Faust welcomed back the Reserve Officer Training Corps earlier this year. This was a highly positive move, as the new policy reversed an antiquated antagonism against the military and better reflects where the University stands on the institution at this point in its history. In this context, the panel—and the military’s presence at other career fairs this year—reflects career counseling at its best, providing students with the resources to explore a variety of professional options."
8 November 2011 Yale Daily News article "Some ROTC courses to receive credit". Note: Yale President Richard Levin stated "that “specially designed” courses — like those being designed by history professor Paul Kennedy — would count both toward students’ degrees and ROTC requirements, but he said most ROTC courses will not count for Yale College credit". See the Credit issues page for background on this issue.
9 November 2011 Columbia spectator article "Occupy movements renew interest in activism". Note: "Yoni Golijov, CC ’12 and member of the Barnard/Columbia International Socialist Organization, outlined some of the factors influencing the 1968 protesters: “They had a racist expansion, the gym being built in Morningside Heights with a back entrance for community members … they had the war in Vietnam, and they had ROTC on campus.” ... “So now we have three wars, at least, we have another racist expansion, and we have ROTC back on campus, and … we want to have a voice. There are student groups popping up just everywhere … radicals, liberals, progressives, conservatives, whatever.”"
10 November 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "A farewell to arms: As the Iraq War comes to an end, let us welcome our veterans home". Note: Noting the troops coming home from Iraq, and noting Columbia's engagement with ROTC, and how Columbia recruits undergraduates throughout the country, Spectator suggests "why not begin deploying those same admissions officers to military posts, with a mission to inform transitioning service-members about the opportunities Columbia offers".
10 November 2011 Yale Daily News article "Navy engages student groups". Note: "The Navy has also reached out to both the Yale Sailing Team and the Yale Aviation Society to help the ROTC program integrate into Yale’s culture and access training equipment... “As American military aviation really had its start at Yale with the group that was to become Yale Aviation,” said [Yale Aviation Society coordinator Ty] Kamp ['98]. “we are uniquely positioned to offer flight training and ground instruction to cadets and other interested parties.”"
10 November 2011 Harvard Gazette article "To honor the living and the dead: Veterans Day ceremony on 11/11/11 will unveil new memorial tablet". Note: "The holiday is especially significant for Harvard, since it’s the first Veterans Day in 40 years when there has been a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) office on campus." The new memorial tablet reflecting all 17 known Medal of Honor recipients from Harvard was timed for Veterans Day.
11 November 2011 National Review article "Crimson Valor: Harvard embraces its long-forgotten military past" by Brian Bolduc. Note: The article describes how Harvard's reconciliation with the military goes beyond the welcoming of ROTC.
11 November 2011 Stanford Daily article "Hennessy talks ROTC, GSB gift at Faculty Senate". Note: Discussing ROTC, Stanford's president said that "because of “budgetary difficulties the Department of Defense faces,” the University “will probably end up exploring alternative opportunities.” These may include alternative options for students who currently commute, forming a consortium with area schools and the United States Naval Academy or asking the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policies (C-USP) to consider granting some academic credit to students who take ROTC courses off-campus."
11 November 2011 National Review article "Harvard Veterans Mark Holiday". Note: "Thomas Reardon, president of the Harvard Veterans Alumni Organization said “For the first time in 40 years", the university had “something to celebrate” on Veterans’ Day. Gone was “the ominous pall” that had descended on the campus in 1969, when the university ejected ROTC in protest of the Vietnam War."
14 November 2011 New York Times article "Recruiting Veterans, Columbia Finds an Impressive Applicant Pool". Note: Columbia not only has the highest number of veterans as undergraduates at elite colleges, but has been recruiting at military bases to find the best candidates. "In a day sitting in on interviews with the 10 applicants — all in their mid-20s — a pattern emerges: generally speaking, they once were lost, but now are found."
15 November 2011 Stanford Daily article "Campus ROTC unlikely". Note: "The lack of progress is primarily due to low levels of student interest and concerns about financial sustainability, according to Senior Assistant to the President Jeff Wachtel." The alternatives are likely to be collaboration with nearby ROTC programs and "could include anything from allowing other ROTC units to hold events on campus to hosting ROTC courses taught by Stanford faculty for ROTC students from Stanford and the partner universities."
16 November 2011 Brown Daily Herald letter "Interest in ROTC needs context" by Jonathan Hillman.'09. Note: Responding to a 7 November news story, Hillman argues that 7% interest in on-campus ROTC at Brown is an impressive number, and there would be more if students came to Brown because of on-campus ROTC. He argues that polling current Brown students about their interest in ROTC "is akin to surveying attendees of a vegan convention about their interest in hamburgers."
22 November 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Female ROTC Member Challenges Stereotypes". Note: A woman decided to transfer to the Marine option in the Navy ROTC unit, and is not only beating the physical ability goals for females but approaching those for males.
1 December 2011 Yale Daily News article "ROTC instructors welcomed into faculty". Note: Yale will grant the commanding officers of its new Naval and Air Force ROTC units the title of professor adjunct, "a title usually given to professional writers, performing artists, or business leaders who have significant professional experience but lack advanced degrees". Also, "Capt. Ron Harrell, who will serve as the commanding officer for Yale’s Naval ROTC, said he has attended two faculty meetings on campus this semester. At the first of these meetings, Harrell said Yale College Dean Mary Miller introduced the commanding and executive officers of the ROTC units to the faculty. After both meetings, Harrell said numerous faculty members came over to introduce themselves to him and exchange contact information."
5 December 2011 Columbia Spectator article "After transparency concerns, NROTC committee names released". Note: Columbia's ROTC committee will include two students. Neither is an ROTC student and neither is at the engineering school, expected to be the part of the university with highest Naval ROTC participation. Interim Provost John Coatsworth said purpose of the committee is to ensure that the ROTC program meets Columbia’s academic standards. University Senator, ROTC cadet, and army veteran Jose Robledo endorsed an ROTC+ vision, saying he hopes the committee will help design a program that exceeds Columbia’s academic standards and challenges students.
6 December 2011 Brown Daily Herald article "Campus ROTC office gains favor". Note: Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron said that an office, suggested by the Corporation, is likely to begin operating next year. Its mission is still uncertain but it would support student veterans and may direct prospective cadets to ROTC programs at nearby institutions and will "make visible the support the University is already giving". Others were interviewed and polled on the ROTC issue, and the policy towards transgender people in the military appears to be pivotal in attitudes towards on-campus ROTC.
7 December 2011 Columbia Spectator article "After 43 years, Navy meets with students about CU ROTC". Note: Only a handful of students stopped by the information session, which was publicized in an email to sutdents from the provost, but the session was in the last week of classes before final exams.
9 December 2011 Eric's Learning curve blog post "Modular concept of Columbia ROTC+". Note: "The basic premise of the modular concept is that delegating the required NROTC training to SUNY Maritime allows the ROTC components on the Columbia campus to be customized to Columbia ROTC+."
Winter 2011-12 Columbia College Today letter "ROTC" by Prof. Allan Silver. Note: Responding to a previous letter, Silver notes that universities with ROTC "have full control of faculty appointments and the award of credit for courses... Drill in uniform — certainly with weapons — has long not been held on campuses that do not wish it. Uniforms are not routinely worn. Columbia students in ROTC programs are not under military discipline. They enter the military after graduation, when commissioned as officers. In all relevant respects, they are indistinguishable from fellow students and have all the formal and informal rights enjoyed by other students".
18 December 2011 Providence Journal op-ed "The Ocean State deserves a Navy ROTC unit" by Jonathan Hillman. Note: The chairman of Brown Alumni for ROTC describes the key role played by Rhode Island in the history of the Navy, and noting Brown University's reluctance to host an ROTC program suggests that another university or the Naval War College be the hub for a statewide program.
30 December 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed "How to Get More Ivy Leaguers Into ROTC" by Cheryl Miller and Jon Hillman. Note: Despite the publicity about elite universities welcoming ROTC, "for all the fanfare, Yale is the only university that will have cadets training on campus next fall". Miller and Hillman suggest that the "military could partner with faculty and administrators to attract students and improve ROTC courses, even designing and co-teaching courses that meet both university standards and military requirements. A few such courses already exist—such as Yale's Grand Strategy program, taught by Paul Kennedy, John Lewis Gaddis, Charles Hill and others—and administrators should encourage more collaboration." They suggest that elite colleges "need to recruit potential warrior-scholars, going head-to-head with the service academies and other elite schools that never discontinued their ROTC programs.... That will mean offering real incentives: financial aid supplements, room and board for cadets and so on." See response on 18 January.

Please contact us if you have more links to add.