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Revisiting Harvard ROTC
On June 6, eleven Harvard seniors were honored at Harvard's annual ROTC commissioning ceremony. Taking their oaths and receiving their first salutes as officers, Harvard's latest group of ROTC graduates listened to stirring words from Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs Stephen Rosen.
"Four years ago, Harvard chose you, and four years ago you chose military service," Rosen said. "You chose military service in 2003, in a time of war. You chose military service, knowing that you could be sent by your country in harm's way. You did not choose the peacetime military, but, rather, the life of a warrior. Harvard honors public service, but is uneasy with national military service, because Harvard is uneasy with war, and with warriors, and increasingly sees itself as an international university, not simply an American university."
"We all wish to avoid war, with all our hearts," Rosen continued. "And we welcome students and faculty from around the world. But the United States is our country. Without the United States, there would be no Harvard, and we should never forget that. And our country is still at war, and so I salute your courage, your commitment to national service, and the...sacrifices you have made and will make."
Rosen's words, excerpted in the Harvard Magazine and the New York Sun, are an apt and concise outline of why ROTC matters, and of this country's long tradition of working with universities to train an educated class of citizen-soldiers. But Rosen's words were not heard by either Derek Bok or Drew Faust, Harvard's outgoing and incoming presidents. Though former Harvard president Lawrence Summers showed his support for ROTC by attending the commissioning ceremony during each year of his presidency, neither Bok nor Faust chose to do so.
ROTC was once a thriving program at Harvard. But, as Rosen notes, Harvard no longer sees itself as a primarily American entity, nor does it offer strong support for students who wish to serve their country. Harvard's ROTC students do not train on campus; they must commute to MIT (an arrangement made in 1976, under Bok's first presidency). They do not receive course credit for the military science courses they take, nor does Harvard pay the six-figure annual fee required to make that training at MIT possible. That fee is paid instead by anonymous alumni who stepped in during the 1990s after the Harvard faculty voted to stop paying as a protest against "don't ask, don't tell." Over the years, alumni and student efforts to return ROTC to Harvard's campus have met with strong faculty resistance.
It's regrettable that Presidents Bok and Faust failed to attend Harvard's commissioning ceremony for reasons laid out in the Wall Street Journal and the Sun. It's also regrettable, as Rosen notes, that Harvard faculty appear to believe their personal preferences and politics supersede a greater obligation to enable students to undertake national service at their own university.
But it's also possible to reverse that course. Last February, Faust declared that she has "enormous respect for these students who commit themselves to this effort and to the service of their country" and indicated her sense that "It might be a time to look at [the issue of ROTC on campus] again and see what the right positions on these issues are." What a message it would send for Faust to weigh in this fall on the side of civic responsibility. And what a remarkable thing it would be for Harvard's new President to explore ROTC's restoration--not as a sop to conservatives, and not, by any means, as an endorsement of the war in Iraq--but in support of students' rights and the fundamentally liberal purpose of ROTC: to infuse the military with college graduates who embrace the robust exchange of ideas and who can help prevent the rise of what scholar Michael Neiberg has called a narrow "military caste."
Perhaps Faust will reflect, therefore, on what her absence says to Harvard students, faculty, alumni--not to mention the American people. And perhaps she'll choose a different path.
Posted by acta online on July 13, 2007 at July 13, 2007 01:40 PM
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Comments
"They do not receive course credit for the military science courses they take."
Sheesh. You can have ROTC without subsidizing the educations of those who wish to participate. They don't get credit for working at the radio station or playing in the band or rowing with the boating club, do they? All of those extracurricular activities are without a doubt educational (as ROTC classes are), but very little that is educational is or should be given credit as a step toward a university degree.
Posted by: Edumacational at July 16, 2007 09:14 AM