The university system in the U.S. is deeply militarized—and increasingly so, as outlined by a recent article in The Nation, “Repress U”. This militarization takes forms ranging from Pentagon surveillance of student anti-war protesters in Santa Cruz and Albany to the management of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs by the University of California.

Columbia is, thankfully, not leading this trend. While it restricts protest on campus, it has never threatened students with expulsion for distributing unauthorized fliers, as Hampton University did in late 2005. Though it gets more than 10 million dollars per year in Department of Defense research funding, the University has a policy stemming from the Vietnam War era that this research cannot be classified.

However, Columbia’s record has some definite black marks. As of 2006, Columbia had more than four million dollars of its endowment invested in three war contractors, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Besides selling everything from bullets, bombs, missiles, warplanes, and tanks to “interrogators” on contract, these corporations have tight political ties to the Bush administration and its war policy.

Last semester, the Columbia Coalition Against the War submitted a formal proposal to the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing—an appointed body made up of students, faculty, and alumni—recommending that Columbia divest from military contractors, at least for the duration of the war in Iraq. At the end of winter break, the committee formally rejected the proposal.

The committee did not dispute the proposal’s condemnation of the war in Iraq, nor the proposal’s statement that war contractors’ “political influence has played a part in both launching the war and continuing the occupation,” nor even that “U.S.-based military contractors certainly have more direct ties to the war in Iraq than did the corporations from which Columbia (justifiably) divested due to their businesses in Sudan or South Africa to the violence in those countries.”

Instead, the committee gave two reasons for rejecting divestment. First, according to its letter, “The Committee was unclear as to what the actual issue at hand was ... the war in Iraq or the operations of these particular companies.” This seems disingenuous—clearly, the issue is that these companies, through their operations, bear (some) responsibility for the war in Iraq. Second, “It was not felt by the Committee that there was broad consensus within the University community regarding the issue.” It’s true that hard evidence of student, faculty, and staff opinion is lacking, but by maintaining its investments, Columbia does not maintain its neutrality. It has chosen to own a piece of the war.

This is bad enough. The last thing the University needs to do is to strengthen its connection to the war. Yet, that is exactly what a recent Spectator editorial advocated—the return of the military Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) to campus.

The military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy, which forbids openly lesbian or gay members from serving, violates Columbia’s nondiscrimination policy. Coerced by a federal law, Columbia allows military recruiting on campus, but the University has drawn the line at hosting an ROTC program.

DADT is a sufficient justification for this decision, but not the only one. The U.S. is currently engaged in a war in Iraq which has killed almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers and as many as a million Iraqis, while driving several million more Iraqis from their homes and tearing apart Iraqi society into warring sectarian factions. Thanks to the war, the military is short on soldiers, and the purpose of ROTC is to recruit and train students to fill this need. This should not become a Columbia program.

Columbia cannot and should not restrict what its students choose to do after graduation, but it does not usually offer curricula chosen by any employer, and does not ordinarily allow employers with discriminatory policies like DADT to even recruit on campus. There is no reason to make an exception here. If the military’s mission makes it an unusual employer, that mission currently centers on a disastrous occupation. Though Columbia students entering ROTC might wish to improve or reform the military, its current problems stem not from its personnel, but from its role, as a means for aggression in Iraq and elsewhere. Whether or not the program could give students who might not otherwise be able to afford Columbia the ability to A, increased financial aid is a much more direct and less problematic solution for which to fight. Nobody should be forced to join the military in order to afford college.

Whether investment or recruitment is the issue, Columbia should refuse avoidable entanglement with the military. The military has made more than enough inroads into U.S. education, and a genuine “global university”—or any institution with an international perspective and a respect for human rights—cannot be part of a U.S. imperial project.

David Judd is a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science majoring in computer science. The Point, However runs alternate Fridays.