Bring ROTC to the Ivy League

At Columbia University last fall, during one of their rare campaign appearances together, Barack Obama and John McCain agreed that the continued resistance of Columbia and other prestigious colleges to the training of reserve officers was wrong.

“I recognize there are students who have differences in terms of military policy,†said Columbia alumnus Obama. “But the notion that young people here at Columbia or anywhere in the university, aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake.â€

The Greek historian Thucydides put it a bit more bluntly more than 2,000 years ago when he wrote that “a nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors has its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.â€

But it wouldn’t have done for Obama to quote Thucydides; Karl Rove would have said he was calling our fighting men and women fools and the debate would have raged on the cable news outlets for weeks. Thucydides was, of course, referring to the scholarly elite needing its men of courage and the military its scholars.

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Forty years ago, many colleges kicked out the ROTC to protest the Vietnam War and as a result, we have built a wall between two generations of the nation’s best and brightest students and the nation’s armed forces. We have just about closed the armed forces to graduates of schools that produce a disproportionate number of leaders in every facet of public life but the military. It’s time that changed.

I bring this up after reading in The Washington Post a provocative, if slightly tongue-in-cheek suggestion by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Ricks, who has written extensively on military matters and covered the Pentagon for the Post and The Wall Street Journal.

“Want to trim the federal budget and improve the military at the same time?†asked Ricks. “Shut down West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy and use some of the savings to expand ROTC scholarships.â€

While he admires West Point, Annapolis and Air Force Academy officers, Ricks said that they receive what amounts to “a community college education†compared with the graduates of many of the finest civilian colleges, and at twice the cost.

“Why not send young people to more rigorous institutions on full scholarships,†Ricks asked, “and then, upon graduation, give them a military education at a short-term military school?†Officers would come to the military after attending civilian schools where they would be educated with future doctors, judges, teachers, executives, mayors and members of Congress, rather than alongside other officers who share their beliefs and biases.

Ricks points out that half of the last six chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are products of ROTC programs, not the service academies, and some of the academies’ stars, like Gen. David Petraeus, who holds a doctorate from Princeton, have benefited from post-graduate education in the Ivy League.

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Aside from the unlikelihood of such a drastic reform in military education getting anywhere with Congress or the public, there is one more problem with this eminently sensible proposal to educate more future officers in our best colleges: that four-decades-old ban of the ROTC.

In the Ivy League, the ROTC has been reinstated at Princeton and Penn and there is a part-time program at Dartmouth, but it remains locked out of Harvard, Brown, Columbia and Yale.

There is little student opposition to restoring the ROTC at these colleges. The student newspapers at Yale and Brown have called for it and the Yale Political Union has approved a resolution inviting the ROTC’s return to campus. But there are faculty members, the anti-war Vietnam generation grown older, but not necessarily wiser, who still nurse a 40-year grudge and fall back on the anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell†policy of the military as Exhibit A against once again welcoming the ROTC to academe.

Students see bringing back the ROTC as an opportunity to oppose “don’t ask, don’t tell†and point out something their faculty elders overlook: The laws like “don’t ask, don’t tell†are made by Congress, not the military. As the Yale Daily News editorialized last fall, “In bringing the program [ROTC] back to campus, the University must not abandon its opposition to Congress’ discriminatory policy that prevents openly gay Americans from enlisting. In fact, it should seize such a moment to reinvigorate the debate.â€

The editorial said institutions like Harvard, Columbia and Yale, having produced more than their share of statesmen, jurists and presidents, but few generals and admirals, should know better: “On a more fundamental level, Yale, of all schools, should reconnect to its history as a college at the forefront of national defense and public service.â€

And the writer recalled a Thucydides-like warning from the late Gen. William Odom, a West Point graduate with a Yale Ph.D., who was chairman of the National Security Agency before ending his career as a Yale professor:

“When a republic’s upper strata of youth contribute no leadership to the upper ranks of the military, is the republic really safe?’â€

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.