The Moral Cost of ROTC on Campus
By Colman McCarthy
On parent’s weekend at the University of Notre Dame in 1989, I interviewed Father Theodore Hesburgh. He had retired two years before after 35 years as the university’s president. Graciously, he invited me to lunch at the campus inn. In addition to taking modest pride for having raised several billion dollars for Notre Dame, the priest had similar feelings about the university’s Reserve Officers Training Corps. More than 700 student-cadets were in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine branches. Few universities, public or private, had a larger percentage of students in uniform. The school could have been renamed Fort Hesburgh.
When I offered the view that Notre Dame’s hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school’s many positives, Father Hesburgh said not at all: Notre Dame was being a model of patriotism by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics and who loved God and country. He stated firmly that Notre Dame’s ROTC program was a way to “Christianize the military.”
I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat or a Christian way of firebombing cities or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ’s teaching of loving one’s enemies.
The interview, which quickly slid downhill at that point, comes to mind now that ROTC has resurfaced as a national issue: will elite schools like Harvard, Yale and other Ivies be opened to ROTC as Congress has repealed Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell and the schools can no longer can argue that the military is biased against gays and therefore not welcomed.
As the academic senates of the Ivies do their pondering and mulling, and the Pentagon which oversees ROTC programs on more than 300 campuses asks itself if it even wants to expand to the elite campuses, the schools still have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay regardless of the repeal. They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts. They can stand with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his view of America’s habitual warmaking: “This madness must cease,” he said from a pulpit in April 1967. Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive the country into record depths of debt. The current budget of $725 billion is more than twice the $305 billion in 2000. They can align themselves with colleges like Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence. For service after college, these schools say, consider the Peace Corps, not only the Marine Corps.
Will the Ivies have the courage for such stands? I’m doubtful. Only one of the eight Ivy League schools--Cornell—has a peace studies program. Their pride in running programs in women’s studies, black studies and gay and lesbian studies is well-founded, but the schools have small claims to greatness so long as the study of peace is not as equal to the other departments when it comes to size and funding.
While at Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several others after, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses. The many students I interviewed were candid about their reasons for signing up: free tuition and monthly stipends, plus the guarantee of a job in the military after college. With some exceptions, they were from families that couldn’t afford the ever rising college tabs.
To oppose the ROTC, as I do now and have done since my colleges days in the 60s when my school enticed too many my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s: not for their violent methods of settling conflicts but for their discipline, for loyalty to their buddies, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I’ve had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.
ROTC and its warrior ethic necessarily taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace. If a school like Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, another Pentagon Annex.