With the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seemingly on its way out, University Senate members are preparing for what the repeal would mean for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps on Columbia’s campus.
If “don’t ask, don’t tell”—the controversial military policy that prohibits gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members from disclosing their sexual orientation—is thrown out, USenate members want to be sure students have had their say about ROTC’s possible return to Columbia. While the USenate won’t officially address the status of Columbia ROTC until the policy has been officially eliminated, members are preparing student outreach to take the campus temperature on the matter. The hope is that student input now will shape later decisions on campus policy.
“We don’t want to be caught off-guard. We don’t want ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ to be repealed and then be handed something that says, ‘ROTC is coming back,’” said Andrew Springer, a student senator from the Columbia Journalism School. “We are crafting a strategy. We haven’t fully fleshed it out yet, but we know we want to get student opinion on this, so we want to hold hearings. We are willing to do polls and surveys.”
Tao Tan, CC ’07, Business ’11, and chair of the USenate’s Student Affairs Committee, added that it’s important that students get a say in the future of ROTC at Columbia.
“We don’t want a faculty-dominated process,” Tan said. “Our priority since day one is to ensure that the student voice is heard.”
Springer said the Student Affairs Committee has asked all of its members to start approaching students in their constituencies and gathering their opinions on the ROTC question.
Even so, the USenate has decided not to reopen the issue officially while “don’t ask, don’t tell” remains in the picture, according to faculty senator and astronomy professor James Applegate.
Columbia College Student Council President Learned Foote, CC ’11, said CCSC is not taking any steps regarding ROTC at the moment either, even though the council conducted a survey in the fall of 2008 that solicited students’ opinions on the topic.
Foote called ROTC “a campus-wide issue” that falls under the domain of the USenate, not of the student councils, but added that CCSC would conduct polls or take other actions to gauge student opinion if the USenate asked it to do so.
A history with the Senate
In 1916, Columbia formed one of the first Navy ROTC detachments in the nation, according to the University’s website. But the University broke ties with the program during the Vietnam War, and the movement to bring ROTC back to campus didn’t begin in earnest until 2003, Applegate said.
At that time, several students spearheaded a proposal for ROTC to be invited back to Columbia. The proposal was based on a poll CCSC conducted during its elections that year, which showed that 65 percent of CC students were in favor of reinstating ROTC.
During the 2004-2005 academic year, University President Lee Bollinger decided to hand the issue over to the University Senate and put together a task force consisting of faculty, students, and an alumni to explore it, Applegate said.
“At least 95 percent of the conversation was about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” said Applegate, who was the faculty co-chair of the task force. “The sense of the conversation was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is a discriminatory law, and the response was, ‘Yes, we know that. Let’s talk about ROTC.’”
During the 2005 debate, Applegate said he noticed, “Nobody who was in favor of ROTC supported ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’
In the end, the task force was split 5-5 on whether to return ROTC to campus immediately, Applegate said. When the task force’s resolution was sent to the Senate’s Executive Committee, the Executive Committee ignored the tie and decided to release a decisive resolution that called for a ROTC program to be established on campus “as soon as is practicable.”
In May 2005, the Senate voted 53-10 against the ROTC resolution, with five abstentions.
Applegate said he discovered that “this is an issue on which very thoughtful people can and will respectfully disagree.”
But Tan said he felt the process in 2005 was “faculty-dominated”—something he doesn’t want to see again if the issue is renewed.
“The 2005 task force was this massive entity that basically stage-managed a very complex process where they listened less and talked more. We want to do exactly the reverse,” Tan said. This time around, he said, his goal is to see “the students get to take the lead.”
The issue came up again in 2008 through an undergraduate referendum, which ROTC lost by a very narrow margin. Fifty-one percent of students voted against it, while 49 percent were in favor.
One reason for the large number of students in favor of the program, Applegate said, was the higher percentage of military veterans on campus in 2008 thanks to the School of General Studies’ increased recruiting efforts.
Some questioned the validity of the survey, though, because glitches in its online format allowed students to vote multiple times and alumni with Columbia logins to vote as well.
“I don’t think there was the level of faculty acceptance of student leadership on this issue as there is now,” Tan said of the 2008 process.
Repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’
Applegate said that if “don’t ask, don’t tell” were repealed, the issue would go back to the University Senate, which would most likely pick up where it left off in May 2005 and reconsider the resolution calling for the establishment of an ROTC program on campus “as soon as is practicable.”
Tan added that the Student Affairs Committee would hold an open hearing to gather student input.
Many people believe that if “don’t ask, don’t tell” is removed from play, the vote will be in favor of ROTC.
“They [students] were basically split even, and it was dominated by ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Applegate said of the 2008 student vote. “My personal guess is that if you got rid of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and said, ‘Do you want ROTC back?’, the vote would be overwhelmingly ‘yes.’”
Foote agreed, saying, “The student body was very closely divided, and if ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ disappeared … I think that would tilt the favor toward the program.”
If “don’t ask, don’t tell” were repealed, Applegate believes it would open the door to a new discussion about Columbia’s role in the military in general, not only in terms of ROTC.
“We as a community have not had a discussion about ROTC or about our relationship with the military in 40 years. ...What the discussion should have been [in 2005], which didn’t really happen, is: Is the fact that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is a discriminatory law and it violates the University’s nondiscrimination policy enough to preclude us from establishing a ROTC program?”
Foote echoed similar sentiments. “The law [“don’t ask, don’t tell”] should not factor into the decision to have ROTC on campus … but I do think that [repealing the law] would make a very big difference on campus,” he said.
Still, that’s not to say that a reserve officer training program would come to Columbia, even if the University gave its seal of approval.
“We [the University] actually don’t offer them that much,” Applegate said, adding that he expected very few Columbia students to choose to participate in the program. In the past, ROTC students would train at Fordham or the Air Force unit at Manhattan College.
Regardless, he said, “I don’t think the fact that the military, even if we extend the invitation, might not come back means we should not have our discussion on campus about what relationship we want.”
Foote said that making the offer would be a way of moving away from the tensions of 1968, when large-scale campus protests painted the school as hostile to the military—tensions that arguably still linger.
A perennial issue
ROTC is a perennial hot-button topic at Columbia, and USenate members say they see it as a returning debate this semester. “I think it is fair that this will be an issue again,” Springer said, but added that he doesn’t foresee any movement happening on “don’t ask, don’t tell”—or, by extension, ROTC—in the next year.
ROTC came up in discussions of the topics most likely to be on the USenate’s agenda this year, according to Applegate. He said the issue is unique because it is “an issue that has transcended generations of students.”
Still, the issue isn’t going anywhere: even two years ago, Applegate said, it was “clear that it [the ROTC debate] was going to be around for a while.”
“Like it or not, the military is a permanent and essential part of American society, and it is part of our collective responsibility as Americans to obtain that,” Applegate said. “We do not want to isolate ourselves in the ivory tower and shut the door on the rest of the world. We want to engage the world.”
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