COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

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.