Administrators at Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities are softening their resistance to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps more than four decades after the military scholarship programs were driven from campus in the face of fierce antiwar sentiment.
Many professors, students, and administrators say the more welcoming climate is a result of growing support for the military since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But they contend it has become pronounced since February, when Pentagon leaders for the first time advocated overturning the law that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the ranks.
Some college administrators consider the ban on gays in the military discriminatory and have cited it as a reason to keep full ROTC programs off campus long after the Vietnam War ignited the controversy.
“The declaration of military leaders regarding abolition of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy means the fig leaf that university administrators and professors have been hiding behind is about to be withdrawn,” said Army National Guard Captain Marc Lindemann, a Harvard Law School graduate who completed an analysis of the issue for the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.
Harvard, which has not fully recognized ROTC since the antiwar protests of the early 1970s, now allows the small number of its students who participate in the program at MIT to be commissioned as officers in Harvard Yard upon graduation. And in a highly symbolic show of support, the president of the university, Drew Gilpin Faust, has attended the ceremonies the past two years and is expected to attend again next month. Harvard also now allows cadets to include their ROTC affiliation in yearbooks.
“They have been far more receptive,” said retired Navy Captain Paul E. Mawn, a 1966 Navy ROTC graduate who runs the group Advocates for Harvard
ROTC, which he said has 2,300 members. Last year, he said, Harvard “even invited General David Petraeus,” the top US commander in the Middle East, to the commissioning ceremony.
At Brown University in Providence, where Army ROTC students must commute to Providence College for drills and military science classes, a top dean has pledged to do more to support students in ROTC, including finding ways to award them academic credit for their military courses.
Last month, the Faculty Senate at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., established a committee to study whether to overturn its ban.
Well, if Harvard and Stanford had a problem with the Defense Department, they sure didn't have a problem taking money from DARPA over the years. You know, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...
Harvard's own website touts the money coming in from DARPA.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded a new multi-institution research initiative in Nano- and Micro-electro-mechanical Systems (NEMS/MEMS) in affiliation with Harvard’s programs in engineering and applied sciences. The three-year program has over $2M in total funding from DARPA and industry partners.
And Stanford professors put DARPA funding on their CVs
Changes, Consistency and Configurations in Heterogeneous, Distributed Systems. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 1995-1998, total funding approx. $825,000. Principle Investigator.
An Integrated Information Management System. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 1994-1997, total funding approx. $2,000,000. Co-Principle Investigator (with H. Garcia-Molina and J.D. Ullman).
So their principled about their objections to ROTC on intellectual grounds, right up until someone waves money in front of them.
"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." Thucydides
By: Brant
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