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ROTC reemergence
Colgate University's student newspaper recently reported that the university re-launched its ROTC program this semester (it had been disbanded during the Vietnam War). Although it only has three students right now, another four have already expressed interest. In the words of Army First Sergeant Ken Alcorn, who came to Colgate to lead its program after building up a successful one at Utica College: "To grow an ROTC program in my opinion is not done by the cadre or the people who are running it; it's done by the students. If the program is good, they enjoy it and talk about it and then other people want to do it. The best recruiters are the college students."
As ACTA has heightened public awareness of ROTC's absence from the campuses of many elite universities, administrators have repeatedly used the excuse that ROTC has always been welcome but students are simply not interested in participating. To blame low student interest on a campus with no ROTC presence and, in certain cases, no information whatsoever about the program, necessarily begs the questions of whether a visible presence on campus might not induce more students to participate. Sergeant Alcorn's remarks suggest that this is not in fact an insoluble chicken and egg problem.
Posted by David Azerrad on February 25, 2009 at February 25, 2009 03:10 PM
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