Should ROTC Return to Campus?
By Colman McCarthy
Left-leaning colleges like Harvard are said to scorn the military. Proof? They ban ROTC programs, as Harvard administrators did four decades 40 ago in protest of the Vietnam War. In recent years, and with Vietnam fading from memory and relegated to history seminars, the ban was kept in place by the military’s discrimination against gays and lesbians. Now that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has been repealed, campuses are calling out to the Reserve Officers Training Corps: come back, let’s be buddies again. In January’s State of the Union address, few roars of approval were louder than when President Obama, fulfilling a campaign promise, called for an end to the ban.
If academic freedom and open inquiry are the only two standards that matter on the nation’s campuses, then yes, bring in the colonels, sergeants and retired soldiers to be professors of military science and martial arts in the classrooms and cadence-callers on the drill fields. This is the view of Georgetown University, to take one school as an example. Last May, 26 ROTC cadets were sworn in as 2nd lieutenants. In exchange for four years of free tuition--plus book money and monthly stipends--they will serve eight years in the military on active or reserve duty. The ROTC battalion has long been a fixture at Georgetown. Since 1918, 4,100 cadets have been commissioned.
As seemingly lofty as the academic freedom/open inquiry argument appears to be, it doesn’t hold up for long. The late Fr. Richard McSorley, a Jesuit priest, pacifist and Georgetown professor who believed that “kill and destroy is the central function of the military,” raised the question of whether his school would be as welcoming to other outside groups as it is to the ROTC.
What if, he posed, an international prostitution ring offered to fund a Department of Prostitution at Georgetown: “All the teachers would be chosen from the International Prostitution Ring.” Courses would include “The Psychology of Solicitation, The History of Prostitution, Comparative Prostitution and Its Relationship to Other Cultures [and] Leadership in Prostitution. These courses would be taught by duly recognized and certified national and international pimps.”
Fr. McSorely told of a Georgetown student who was having bit of trouble with his analogy. She asked if he considered the ROTC presence at Georgetown a moral question. He replied: “I consider it both a moral and an academic question, and if anyone thinks it is unfair to the military to compare them to prostitution, I reply that it may be unfair to prostitution. Prostitution doesn’t threaten the survival of the world. Prostitution isn’t supported by taxpayer’s money and the power of the Pentagon.”
I knew and admired Fr. McSorely. As a seminarian in the Philippines in World War II, he was captured and imprisoned by Japanese soldiers. He survived the Bataan Death March. Seeing up close the insanity of militarism, whether advanced by his government or any other, marked him for life. He knew that Georgetown administrators, chummy with a Pentagon less than three miles away, would never give ROTC the boot. But he kept on, a lover of long-shots
Besides academic freedom and open inquiry, a third standard--an overriding
one--exists: educational purity. A college campus ought to be the one place teachers of military violence, or any kind of violence, are kept at bay. War is America’s largest federal program, overseen by Congress, cheered by military contractors, lavishly funded by public money and carried out by government workers known as soldiers. It’s noxious enough that ROTC is on more than 350 campuses and an equal number of high schools, but in addition the nation has three military academies, several war colleges and a fat recruitment budget. Isn’t that enough?
State universities that host the ROTC believe the country is better served with college-educated soldiers in the ranks. Catholic universities like Georgetown, Holy Cross and Notre Dame chime in that their cadets will “Christianize the military,” to use Fr. Theodore Hesburgh’s wishful phrase. No credible research backs up those fantasies. Are Afghan civilians slain by American soldiers any less dead because a Christian did the killing?
Non-ROTC schools like Hobart, Eastern Mennonite University, Goshen, Guilford, Vassar, Haverford, George Fox, Wilmington and others believe that America’s national security is better served by teaching students about nonviolent conflict resolution, economic justice, human rights, sharing wealth and consuming less. Instead of might makes right, they go with right makes might.