With the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, some colleges and universities may be welcoming ROTC back to campus. AP reports:
“I think it’s more than just rhetoric right now,” said Donald Downs, a professor of political science, law and journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a forthcoming book on the military and universities. “Especially at the administrative level, I think the schools are sincere. The real question is how willing the military might be.”
Opposition might arise, but universities largely value the positive impact veterans bring to campus, as well as their GI Bill money, Downs said. At the same time, the military long ago shifted officer recruitment to the South, “and a lot of people in the military, they’re not sure the Ivy League type of student is the kind that would make a good warrior,” he said.
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Maj. Monica Bland, a Department of Defense spokeswoman, said it is premature to know how the repeal of DADT will affect ROTC. Right now, 489 schools host ROTC units, and nearly 2,469 schools have cross-town affiliations with those units. The number of host campuses has remained stable in recent years, even as cadet and midshipmen enrollment has risen, Bland said.
“They don’t really need these schools,” said Michael Desch, a political science professor at Notre Dame and an ROTC expert. “It would be symbolic in terms of having the Ivies and other elite schools sort of come back in the fold.”
Gary J. Schmitt and Cheryl Miller write:
Faculty can help bring ROTC into mainstream campus life by offering appropriate academic credit for ROTC coursework, particularly in advanced subject areas. The common objection among faculty is that the ROTC curriculum is too vocational. This objection merits revisiting, however, as universities have increasingly allowed credit for professional or vocational courses. At Stanford, students can receive credit for internships; at Yale for teacher certification programs; at Columbia, with its new finance major, for accounting classes. Furthermore, there's no reason faculty cannot work with the military to enhance the ROTC curriculum and develop rigorous offerings in such relevant fields as political science, anthropology, or economics. Universities could put this opportunity to even greater use by strengthening their course offerings in weak subject areas, such as military and diplomatic history.
Top-tier schools should aim to have top-tier ROTC programs. In so doing, they would help ensure that the American officer corps reflects America as a whole--thereby allowing ROTC to fulfill its original purpose. No less important, returning ROTC to elite university campuses will restore a proud tradition of military service. When the first ROTC units were established at the land grant colleges, students at Harvard, Yale, and other prominent schools petitioned for their own programs so they too might have the chance to demonstrate their patriotism. And serve they did. Yale's Memorial Hall is covered from floor to ceiling with the names of students and faculty who fought from World War I through the Vietnam war, while Harvard boasts the highest number of Medal of Honor recipients outside the service academies.
