Struggles for full citizenship are conducted in the highly symbolic setting of military service. Since the Second World War, Japanese, African-Americans, Hispanics, and women have found military service central to claims for equality and respect. In my judgment, legislative reform will address the denial of military service to open homosexuals. The enduring question is whether ROTC belongs at Columbia under any circumstances. The strongest case in favor is based on a sense of historic and civic obligation.
Protected by oceans and without threatening neighbors, America had no large, standing military. In three big wars—the Civil War and two world wars—10 to 12 percent of the population served in huge, temporary militaries. Today, 1 percent of Americans serve in a long-term voluntary military. The claim that the military unduly relies on the disadvantaged to fill the enlisted ranks is exaggerated. Its composition reflects some social inequalities, but does not amplify them. Indeed, blacks exercise authority over whites more extensively in the military than in any civilian institution.
The question of ROTC raises problems of democratic equality at the other end of the class system. The social composition of students at selective, private colleges is hardly egalitarian. The conspicuous absence from military service of those headed for leading positions in society is a civic scandal—those who benefit most from the nation volunteer the least to serve it under arms. Should Columbia adopt the same posture as privileged elites, cheering or deploring the military from a vicarious distance? Or will it enter into an educational relationship with the military profession, as it does with others?
However, an ROTC program does not militarize the campus. Students in ROTC are in military service only when commissioned after graduation. They are fellow students, oriented toward military service as others are to law, business, medicine, teaching, and other pursuits of civil society. How many Columbia students know fellow citizens in military service? How many have talked seriously with fellow students who are veterans or in ROTC programs elsewhere? When military service is not broadly shared, military and civilian society risk an unhealthy mutual isolation.
Graduates of ROTC programs are about 60 percent of all officers. They constitute 30 to 40 percent of the military’s top leadership—roughly the same proportion as graduates of the three military academies. The quality of military leadership is of vital national interest. While the fading stereotype of “elitist” and “anti-military” campuses that “ban” ROTC lingers after 40 years, the military bears much responsibility in this matter, as well as for serious regional imbalances in the officer corps.
The military withdrew ROTC programs in diverse, urban areas and the Northeast long after the end of conscription and the Vietnam War. Illustratively, Virginia, with a population of over 7,500,000, has 12 Army ROTC programs, while New York City, with about 8,500,000, has two. The large, land-grant public universities of other regions, legally required to have ROTC programs, produce many officers at moderate cost. President-elect Obama commented quite pointedly, on campus two months ago, on the uneven distribution of military service across the country and its negative effects.
I witnessed the passions that drove the Naval ROTC program from Columbia. I was among faculty alerted to intervene in fistfights between students opposing and participating in NROTC. As students faced conscription, faculty debated whether to send grades to draft boards—I started the opposition to this requirement of government. Some faculty, myself among them, planned to abet students refusing conscription for the Vietnam War, seeking to share the risk of conviction and imprisonment. It was an acutely desperate time. Four decades later, we are in a different phase of American history.
Columbia and other private universities never “banned” ROTC. Rather, they reasserted faculty control over appointments, courses, and credits, ending an exemption for ROTC dating to the Second World War. The Department of Defense did not accept these terms. This problem still requires negotiation, perhaps new legislation. In favoring ROTC, I anticipate its successful resolution.
The legislative reform of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is far more advanced. President-elect Obama supports military service by open homosexuals as well as ROTC’s return to his alma mater. Veterans studying at Columbia report that open homosexuals are widely accepted. Mid-rank officers confirm this and suggest that reluctance to reform will decline with the retirement of high-ranking officers whose careers began during the Vietnam War and its sour aftermath. Pressing needs require the recruitment and retention of competent personnel—the same imperative that facilitated the integration of African-Americans and women in the armed forces.
The government and the military must decide whether to invest in a diverse, regionally balanced, educationally qualified military leadership. Columbia must decide if it is prepared to include ROTC among its responsibilities. The site of a great upheaval in the receding 1960s, situated in the Northeast and a great and diverse city, Columbia is well placed symbolically and geographically, and excellently equipped intellectually, to make an important educational and civic contribution to the nation.
Whether you support ROTC now or after DADT’s reform, vote “yes” in the upcoming survey. Only voting “yes” makes it clear that in principle you want Columbia to make that contribution.
The author is a professor in the department of sociology.