ACTA's Must-Reads
« The short list | Main | Retaining great professors »
Setting the record straight on ROTC
ROTC is back in the news. After ACTA sent a letter to seven major university boards calling on them to lift the ban on ROTC, the issue has been receiving coverage in the student press, for example at Brown and Harvard, while the Yale Daily News and the Tufts Daily published editorials calling for the return of ROTC. Meanwhile, students at Columbia are preparing to vote in a referendum on the issue, five years after a similar vote in which 65 percent of students supported ROTC's return.
Those who support the continued ROTC ban broadly fall into two camps: those who ascribe the absence of a program to low student demand and are quick to point to neighboring campuses where ROTC programs are available; and those who oppose a military presence on campus altogether because of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. If trustees are to make an informed decision on this issue, a couple of clarifications are necessary.
First, to blame low student participation while preventing students from participating on campus begs the question of whether an accessible program that does not require a long commute -- Yale cadets, for instance, travel more than 100 miles to the University of Connecticut! -- might not induce more students to join.
Secondly, concerning the opposition to DADT, contrary to a widely held belief, the status of homosexuals in the military was not decided by the Department of Defense, but rather imposed on it by Congress. Universities that disagree with the policy should take it up with their elected representatives, rather than punish their students and deprive them of the opportunity to participate in ROTC on campus.
Posted by David Azerrad on November 05, 2008 at November 5, 2008 10:03 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/495
Comments
I'm not convinced that the source of the military's policy is more important than its existence. If you don't like DADT, you should indeed write your congressman, but that doesn't imply that you can have no objections to the institution that's carrying out the policy. Would you stop protesting the enforcement of segregation laws by local police once you learned that the laws came from the state legislature?
Posted by: skeptical at November 6, 2008 11:56 AM