RUTHFULLY YOURS

ROTC AND THE IVIES

Posted By Ruth King on October 31st, 2009

New York Times – November 1, 2009

The R.O.T.C. Dilemma

By MICHAEL WINERIP

IN a speech last year, Drew Faust, the president of Harvard, congratulated seniors who had gone the extra mile to get their R.O.T.C. training. She meant it literally, and the extra miles they had gone were the least of it.

Harvard has not had a Reserve Officers Training Corps program on campus since antiwar protests in the 1960s shut it down. The handful of Harvard students determined enough to join R.O.T.C. must travel to Boston University and across Cambridge to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their training, under a system developed by the military that allows host universities to serve nearby campuses.

For the last four school years, several times a week, Daniel West, Joe Kristol and Dom Pellegrini, all training to become United States Marine Corps officers, had to get to M.I.T. or B.U. by 5:45 a.m. It was so early the subway wasn’t running yet.

“I’d be up at 4:45 to shave first,” Mr. Kristol said.

Sometimes, when they had the energy and the weather wasn’t too frigid, the three ran the half-hour to B.U. in the predawn darkness. Some days, Mr. Kristol drove them — he says that was the only reason he kept a car, which cost him $250 to $300 a month to park and maintain.

Mr. West, the student executive officer of his Marine R.O.T.C. chapter, had to be at M.I.T. or B.U. six days a week. “I’d try to schedule my Harvard classes around it,” said Mr. West, an economics major who graduated in June. His first year at Harvard, seven freshmen were in the Navy R.O.T.C. group, which includes the Marines. But that year four dropped out.

“Some quit because it wasn’t right for them,” Mr. Kristol said. “But some couldn’t take the logistics.”

It’s worse at Yale, which also banned R.O.T.C. in the ’60s. Students must drive an hour and a half to Storrs to train at the University of Connecticut.

Anthony Runco, a Yale junior, typically leaves New Haven at noon on Thursdays for Air Force training and doesn’t get back until 7:30 p.m. Freshman year he missed a Spanish class every Thursday and had to get notes from a friend; sophomore year it was an electrical engineering class.

Most years one or two graduating seniors in R.O.T.C. are commissioned as officers, according to Jerry Hill, a Yale administrator who oversees the program. Next spring there will be none. At Harvard in June, eight graduates were commissioned, in all three military branches. The year before, there were five.

These modest numbers come even though, in the last five years, the Army has nearly tripled the amount of money it has put into R.O.T.C. scholarships, to $263 million, and increased enrollment nationwide by 26 percent, to 30,721 students, to fill vacancies in its officer corps. It has been a time when military recruiters in all branches, working in a depressed economy, are ­acing their quotas. At Texas A&M, 115 freshmen in 2008 received Army R.O.T.C. scholarships, compared with 35 the year before. The military has a lot at stake: 60 percent of all new Army officers each year come from R.O.T.C. programs.

R. O.T.C. students at Harvard and Yale are not the only ones campus-hopping. Harvard is one of eight colleges served by M.I.T., the Army R.O.T.C. host school. Five of these satellite colleges — Wellesley, Tufts, Gordon, Endicott and Salem State — have arranged for transportation for their cadets to get to M.I.T. Several colleges in the consortium have the R.O.T.C. staff travel to their campuses to conduct military classes and physical training, making it easier on their students.

Harvard, with its campus ban, does neither.

One of the featured speakers at the 2009 Harvard commissioning ceremony, Darnell Whitt II, a retired naval captain, noted that the year he graduated from Harvard — 1959 — 121 seniors were commissioned as officers. He told the R.O.T.C. students that he was sorry their numbers were so few and that he hoped that by the time they returned for their 50th reunion, “the current issues about military matters at Harvard will have been resolved and there will be a closer connection between the great university and those in uniform.”

THIS is the 40th anniversary of the antiwar protests that led to the ban of R.O.T.C. at some of the nation’s most elite universities — Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Tufts. And yet, the attitude on these campuses today is hardly antimilitary. There are numerous signs of genuine respect for the soldiers who serve. An editorial last May in the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which for decades attacked R.O.T.C., praised classmates who had joined the program. “They demonstrate a commitment to service that should be admired and followed by the rest of the student body,” The Crimson said. The Yale, Columbia and Brown student papers have all published editorials in the recent past calling for the return of R.O.T.C. to their campuses.

R. O.T.C. members interviewed at Harvard, M.I.T. and Yale said they rarely if ever heard negative comments around campus, and a few said they had experienced the opposite problem.

“People stop me and thank me for serving,” said Gregory Wellman, an Army R.O.T.C. cadet at M.I.T. “It’s a little awkward because at this point I’m just a student and haven’t done anything.”

Last spring, the Republican club at Harvard sent e-mail messages asking all undergraduates about the ban on R.O.T.C. Of the 1,700 students who answered, 62 percent favored returning it to campus.

At Harvard, the attitude toward the military began to shift after the 9/11 attacks, which was about the time that Lawrence Summers became president. That November, as part of the university’s Veterans Day commemoration, he had letters hand-delivered to all students in the R.O.T.C. program, thanking them for their “commitment to national service.” For years, students could not list R.O.T.C. as an activity in the yearbook because it wasn’t an official program, but that changed after Dr. Summers met with the yearbook staff.

By 2008, under President Faust, Harvard was allowing the Army to land two Black Hawk helicopters on campus to transport Army R.O.T.C. members to Fort Devens, Mass., for weekend training.

During a campaign visit to Columbia University, Barack Obama, a favorite on the Ivy campuses, called the R.O.T.C. ban there wrong. (R.O.T.C. students at Columbia, in Manhattan, go to Fordham University or Manhattan College, both in the Bronx, for training). “The notion that young people here at Columbia, or anywhere, in any university, aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake,” Mr. Obama said.

Not long after that, in an editorial citing Mr. Obama, The Brown Daily Herald reversed its longtime opposition. “R.O.T.C. deserves its day on College Hill,” the editorial concluded. (Currently, Brown R.O.T.C. students are trained at Providence College.)

Despite the small number of graduates commissioned in June, Harvard officials estimated the crowd at the ceremony in the Yard at 2,000, the largest turnout in years, and said they believed it was because Gen. David Petraeus was the featured speaker. He drew the longest, most enthusiastic standing ovation of any speaker that day.

There was just one protestor, a white-haired woman in a wheelchair holding an 8-by-11-inch, hand-lettered sign against her chest that read, “Bring the National Guard Home Now.”

IF it’s not antimilitary sentiment, why is R.O.T.C. still banned at these campuses? Four words: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The law, adopted during the Clinton administration, excludes gay men and lesbians who are open about their sexual orientation from military service. Last month, President Obama renewed a promise to get Congress to overturn the law, but set no timetable.

While the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that colleges accepting federal money could not restrict military recruiters on campus because of the exclusion of gays, the decision did not address R.O.T.C.

President Faust of Harvard, a historian, says that as much as she admires the military ­— and during her June commissioning speech, she went out of her way to mention an interest she and General Petraeus shared in Ulysses S. Grant — she cannot have a student group on campus that is closed to one part of the student body. The student handbook says that the federal law is “inconsistent with Harvard’s values as stated in its policy on discrimination.”

“Harvard commits itself to training leaders of all kinds, and we should be training leaders for the military,” Dr. Faust said in an interview. “We want to have students in R.O.T.C. I am the president of Harvard and I am their president and Harvard is their university. But we also have gay and lesbian students and I am their president and Harvard is their university.”

R. O.T.C. supporters complain that Harvard’s policy is full of contradictions.

Harvard will not pay the $150,000-a-year cross-registration fee that M.I.T. charges to have Harvard students take military science courses there. But university staff members are used to raise that money from wealthy alumni sympathetic to R.O.T.C. And Harvard accepts about $1 million a year from the military in the form of scholarships that cover the cost of tuition for cadets and midshipmen.

Further, while banning R.O.T.C., Harvard is a host to other military-oriented programs. The Kennedy School of Government there runs a yearlong National Security Fellows program for 20 men and women, a large percentage of them midcareer military officers.

During the interview, Dr. Faust started to address each of these issues, then stopped herself. “Trying to maintain two values — nondiscrimination and national service — is very complicated,” she said. “It has us all tied in knots. There are contradictions. We make these sometimes awkward arguments that are less than pure consistency. Why do we do x and not y? Why do we have the helicopters? Why do I appear at the commissioning? There are enormous complexities and contradictions. We wind up creating compromises that are not philosophically consistent.”

“The way to resolve these inconsistencies,” she said, “is to permit gays and lesbians to serve in the military.”

Harvard, of course is not the only place tied up in knots over this. Despite the ban at Yale, the university provides free rental cars to its R.O.T.C. students so they can make the three-hour round trip for training at Uconn. “We try to support these young men and women as much as we can,” Mr. Hill said.

RUTH R. WISSE, a Harvard professor of comparative literature, has criticized the R.O.T.C. ban publicly. She calls the “don’t ask, don’t tell” argument a smokescreen for antimilitary bias and says these universities were so cowed by the antiwar protests of the ’60s that they would do anything not to stir up the same issues again. She thinks President Faust was hypocritical during the 2008 ceremony when she told the five R.O.T.C. students being commissioned, “I wish there were more of you.”

“I find this funny,” Dr. Wisse said. “Nobody has more authority to create more cadets than the president of the university.”

Dr. Michael Segal, a neurologist and 1976 Harvard graduate who is a leader of Advocates for R.O.T.C., disagrees. He characterizes the mood at Harvard these days as “mildly pro-military,” and the concern about gay rights sincere. He thinks the university should welcome R.O.T.C. despite its misgivings about “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Those who worry about excluding gays from the military are split over the best means of bringing about change. The Harvard Crimson editorial supports Dr. Faust, saying that first, President Obama should end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and then Harvard should “embrace R.O.T.C.” The Brown Daily Herald says that R.O.T.C. should be brought back immediately; then students from Brown’s “overwhelmingly liberal campus” who join the military could “provide gay soldiers with valuable allies in the ranks.”

As for the R.O.T.C. members, they have been trained not to answer political questions from reporters. None of the 15 interviewed would discuss their feelings about “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I have no personal opinion,” said Vanessa Esch, 21, a naval R.O.T.C. midshipman who graduated from M.I.T. in June. “I was politically active in high school but as I got closer to serve, I got away from the nitty-gritty of these issues. My professionalism as an officer depends on not giving answers to those kinds of questions. The commander-in-chief does that.”

Roxanne Bras, 22, an Army cadet from Harvard’s class of 2009, called the R.O.T.C. ban just plain sad. “It’s a bad feeling when an institution you love doesn’t support the other institution you love.”

At Harvard, an Army R.O.T.C. scholarship covering full tuition is worth about $40,000 a year. In return, students typically take a military science course each semester, do physical training three times a week, spend a weekend of field training in the fall and spring at Fort Devens and a month between junior and senior year at a leadership program. When they graduate, they become second lieutenants (or ensigns in the Navy) and must serve four years of active duty followed by four years in the Reserves.

The military brass has tried to prod the Ivies by showing support for R.O.T.C. members at these campuses. When Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at Yale in 2007, he took an hour out of a busy schedule to meet with R.O.T.C. students. Gen. Richard Myers, a former chairman, did the same at Harvard.

During a baccalaureate address last March at Princeton, which has campus Army and Air Force R.O.T.C., General Petraeus made a subtle jab at universities that banned their programs: “Let me just say thank you to this Ivy League school for proudly supporting its R.O.T.C. program.”

Yet even if the Harvards and Yales decided tomorrow that they wanted R.O.T.C. back, it’s not clear that would happen anytime soon. Army R.O.T.C. has 273 host campuses, serving an additional 1,256 colleges; Navy R.O.T.C. has 72 hosts serving 86 additional colleges. Whether the military would welcome the holdouts as host campuses or keep them as satellites might have to be battled out politically one day.

The challenge of getting from Harvard and Yale to the host campuses has undoubtedly helped keep R.O.T.C. numbers low, but it is not the only factor at play. While polls show that neither the Iraq war nor the Afghan war is popular with the American people, they are most likely even less popular at these liberal campuses.

R. O.T.C.’s scholarships may also look less enticing at elite universities. Since the 1990s, as endowments ballooned, the Harvards, Yales and M.I.T.’s have greatly expanded their financial aid packages to reach more middle-class families. At M.I.T., 60 percent of undergraduates now receive need-based scholarships. A middle-class student can qualify for substantial aid directly from the university without having to take on the extra demands of R.O.T.C. and committing to military service after graduating.

But the economy could change that. Students from families that were hurt by the downturn but still do not qualify for financial aid could be drawn to the R.O.T.C. scholarship, which is one of the few substantial grants that are not need-based.

Indeed, there are indications that it’s beginning to happen at Cornell. Lt. Col. Steven Alexander, who runs Army R.O.T.C. there, says the economy has had a noticeable impact on interest in the program. Cornell is the only Ivy land-grant university, and part of its founding mission was training military leaders. Today, it is the only Ivy that hosts Army, Navy and Air Force R.O.T.C.

At Cornell, there are 40 cadets enrolled in the Army R.O.T.C. program; 13 will be commissioned in May, the highest number in decades.

M. I.T.’s Army consortium of eight colleges grew to 84 cadets this year, from 49 in 2006. In contrast, the number of Harvard students in Army R.O.T.C. has not changed; it was 16 in 2006 and is 16 today.

AT the Harvard commissioning ceremony, General Petraeus did not bring up the campus ban. It fell to Mr. Whitt, the former naval captain, to make the case for bringing back R.O.T.C.

Mr. Whitt quoted a Harvard president from another era, Abbott Lawrence Lowell. R.O.T.C. was established during World War I, and in 1916, President Lowell spoke about why it was important for Harvard and other universities to do their share: “The aim of a country which desires to remain at peace, but must be ready to defend itself, should be to train a large body of junior officers who can look forward to no career in the Army, and can have no wish for war, yet who will be able to take their places in the field when needed.”

To be in R.O.T.C. often requires marching to a different drummer. As Mr. Wellman headed out for early morning R.O.T.C. workouts at M.I.T., he said, he often passed students coming back to the dorm after a long night out.

The R.O.T.C. students interviewed felt there was a better understanding of the military at M.I.T. than at Harvard or Yale. On the Wednesdays that Boston University midshipmen join the M.I.T., Harvard and Tufts students there, 135 R.O.T.C. members are in uniform on the campus. Two Fridays a month, there are 84 cadets in Army uniforms.

There is more mixing going on at M.I.T. between R.O.T.C. and non-R.O.T.C. students, said Thomas Schaefer, an ensign who graduated from M.I.T. in June. “It allows members of the campus community who would not interact with the military to get a sense of what’s going on with our lives. We understand them better, they understand us better.”

At Harvard and Yale there are so few R.O.T.C. students that on days they wear uniforms, they are mainly a curiosity. Their classmates can’t seem to conceive that a student at an elite college would be preparing to go to war. Mr. West said that after explaining that he was training to be an officer, “they’d say, ‘But someone like you wouldn’t be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan?’ They just didn’t get it.”

Said Taylor Giffen, a Yale Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet who graduated in June, “They’d see me in uniform, and ask, ‘Hey, are you in a play?’ ”

Michael Winerip writes the Generation B column for Sunday Styles.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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