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Thursday, March 03, 2005

"Accept your responsibilities:" Columbia University and ROTC 
This professor makes a very cogent argument.

From the transcript of a Columbia Senate hearing on whether Columbia University should accept an ROTC program on campus:

My name is Allan Silver.  I’m on the faculty.  Apart from my short, inglorious career as a rifleman, I have one other status to report.  I am arguably the only member of the faculty who was on the faculty in the ‘60s and who lived through exactly the events that formed the baseline of this discussion.  And if you feel old, imagine how I feel.  NROTC was sent packing in ’69, I vividly recall.  No one who was here does not recall about the ‘60s because of a convulsive cultural and political upheaval going far beyond this campus, but peaking at this campus, involving the war in Vietnam.  And there was conscription.  And I can assure you that without for a moment minimizing the political and cultural upheaval of the time, which stillresonate of course, the matter of conscription played a very central role.

            Student protest at Columbia and elsewhere against the war receded with remarkable velocity when conscription was phased out.  The circumstances today are very different.  The situation cannot be cast in terms of Vietnam.  It used to be said that the generals fight the last war.  That’s not true. On the whole, the generals are futuristic.  It’s the intellectuals who persist in fighting the last war.  The situation now and for some time is that of a volunteer military, so-called professional military, in any case not a conscriptive military, which cuts deep into the society and across it.  The last time I knew, there were three members of Congress who had children in the military.  The Congress that voted to authorize the war in Iraq had three members of their families who were in the military there.  That speaks to the condition in which we are today.

            The military, love it or leave it, is a permanent, major institution in the American polity.  And that circumstance must be sundered from one’s attitude towards this administration and toward the current military endeavors, which in any case bear no resemblance to those of Vietnam.  In these conditions it would be irresponsible on a political level, using the word politics in its higher sense, not in its, let us say, colloquial sense, for Columbia to refuse having ROTC on the campus.  That’s a tragic choice, and I hope I will not be heard as being unctuous about that matter.  It is a tragic choice.  It may or may not contribute to the civilianization of the military with respect to policies towards homosexuals.  I don’t know.  An argument can be made either way. 

            What I do know is that not doing so, symbolically as well as literally, continues or rather reinforces a cultural isolation of the military from civil society. That was okay in the ‘30s and ‘40s, which produced a General Marshall.  It is not okay now.  It makes Columbia as part of civil society a free rider. a free rider on an institution, like it or not, which is both indispensable and permanent as far as we can tell,  a free rider in which you are not—none of us anymore—forced to serve.  And I think that is a professionally and politically irresponsible and unacceptable situation.

            I was there in ’68 and ’69 and it’s a different world.  You have to accept your responsibilities.



Ummm...what he said.

Jason


 

Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
 
Mark (and all of Jason's readers):

If you have questions about what's happening at Columbia with ROTC, feel free to ask. I'm the spokesman for Advocates for Columbia ROTC and one of the founders of the movement. I can also tell you about the '/cu/rotc' website and its author, ACR chairman and AROTC cadet, Sean Wilkes. E-mail me at elc2003 at columbia.edu, if you want to know.

You also may enjoy the Columbia Spectator Editorial and the columnist op/ed in today's paper.

(When you read them, remember, it is Columbia - keep that context in mind. Change can be incremental.)

ROTC: Return. Exclusion is not AcceptableColumbia Liberals and ROTC Conservatives Can Help Each OtherIf you want to help, drop me a line and we'll work something out.

Eric
 
Mark,

It's all on the website. If you e-mail the advocatesforrotc.org contact, he can help you with more precision, if you don't feel like combing Columbia's archives - as we did. Interesting reading. Which policy do you prefer? The original 1969 decision (later reinforced) or the 90s-added rationale of DADT versus the university non-discrimination policy? Remember, Columbia did have an ROTC program. That program didn't go away just because. This campus-wide debate, now at the university senate level and in the different schools (I just debated the issue in front of the Teachers College senate last night), isn't occurring over nothing.

Which Service ROTC program is committed to Columbia? I'm the wrong person to ask - my influence doesn't reach so far. Perhaps, you can get in touch with someone who does work in that area, say the Pentagon or the House Armed Services Committee. I can tell you about Columbia interest in the ROTC issue, as a Columbia student activist.

It's not just the commute. It's unequal scholarship money (based on Fordham and not Columbia tuition). It's the inability to participate in the full range of ROTC activities. Since Fordham ROTC doesn't work with Columbia, conflicts arise that would be resolved otherwise. For many Columbia students with potential to be good officers, ROTC becomes an unreasonable and an economically unsound option.

I don't know if you've ever served, Mark, but any experienced soldier can tell you that a good soldier, especially one who is a good leader, must be crafted, although he may be born with the right stuff.
 
Thanks. I'm not interested in doing the work to find the policy. I'm just interested in making sure this discussion is framed properly.

Columbia has an ROTC program. What is doesn't have is a resident ROTC program. It seems to me that what you are really talking about is removing that Columbia University policy, which is great, but I suspect that is not the same as bringing ROTC back to campus.

The first requires one type of support, but I would imagine the second requires an altogether different level of support.

If you are serious about "bringing ROTC back to Columbia" as you frame this issue, then I bet you will need to raise the number of Columbia students who become cadets so that the resident program becomes viable. Two differnt things. And I bet that if you take the number of Columbia cadets over the total number of students, you are already at or beyond the national average.

My service personally? 11 years as an Army infantryman

2/75 RGR as an E1-E5
GU ROTC (where, by the way, cadets from 6 other DC Area colleges and universities had to travel to take ROTC)
2-325 AIR as an O1-O2
2/75 RGR as an O2-O3
1ID as an O3.

So my service started with my enlistment at the age of 17 with a Ranger contract. I'm unmoved by the plight of "elite" college students who can't get themselves out of bed to get to drill at Fordham.

Any experienced soldier will tell you that the decision to serve comes with a certain amount of sacrifices. My ROTC scholarship, for instance, didn't come close to paying for all of Georgetown, either. With your sacrifice comes the opportunity to be educated at Columbia.

As a policy, ROTC exclusion is simply wrong. No question. But as a practical matter, in terms of getting cadets from elite universities to serve, I'm not sure that it has much of an impact. I think you will find that the top 10 schools as ranked by US News actually send a proportionally larger share of their population into service than does the rest of the college population at large.
 
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