At Ivy League Schools,
ROTC, Long Banned,
Plots a Comeback
Push May Stir Up Old Passions
On These Elite Campuses;
A Beachhead at Harvard
By JOHN HECHINGER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 16, 2004
Lt. Vincent Tuohey has led a platoon of 30 soldiers patrolling the deadly road to Baghdad's airport. He has dodged bombs, grenades and gunfire. No one doubts his bravery, but he still gets strange looks when he relaxes in the barracks wearing his college T-shirt. "You went to Harvard?" a soldier once asked. "Why did you join the Army?"
Lt. Tuohey, 25 years old and stationed in Baghdad, is part of a rare breed: the Ivy League-educated officer. In the 1960s and 1970s, Brown, Columbia, Harvard and Yale banished the military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps from their campuses amid Vietnam War protests. But earlier generations of students drilled at these schools, and a Harvard lieutenant would not have seemed out of place on the battlefield.
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Now, with the Iraq war bogging down and the Defense Department eager for recruits, some in the military are pushing for a return of ROTC to these elite universities. In recent weeks, the Defense Department has privately asked top brass at the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines whether they are interested in opening a small ROTC outpost at Harvard. For decades students at Harvard who join ROTC, including Lt. Tuohey, have trained at the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
In a letter that is about to be sent to Harvard alumni, Lt. Col. Brian Baker, the commander of the ROTC Army battalion at MIT, says he plans to meet with Harvard President Lawrence Summers in the spring to lobby for a Harvard beachhead. "Our nation needs a cross section of America represented in its officer corps," he writes, adding that he wants to double the number of Harvard cadets to 100.
The latest effort comes after the Defense Business Board, an advisory group to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, issued a little-noticed report this year that called for a return of ROTC to elite, mostly Ivy League, campuses. Members focused on Harvard, but also discussed Columbia and Stanford.
Congress has also ratcheted up the pressure by passing a measure sponsored by Rep. Chris Cox (R., Calif.), a Harvard alumnus. The bill, recently signed into law by President Bush, strengthened an earlier law and made it clear that Congress has empowered the government to withdraw millions of dollars in federal funding from schools that bar military recruiters or the ROTC.
In November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia ruled that the law, known as the Solomon amendment, was unconstitutional because it violated schools' free-speech rights to protest government policy. A government appeal is widely expected.
The recent developments at the Pentagon, in Congress and in the courtroom have put presidents like Harvard's Mr. Summers in a tight spot.
College administrators must try to sidestep potential confrontation with the government and at the same time avoid stirring up old passions and protests against the war in Iraq. Mr. Summers, who has been signaling more openness to ROTC lately, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.
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Few debates better demonstrate America's cultural divide. Harvard's faculty, which voted to expel ROTC amid antiwar sentiment in 1969, now objects to the military's practice of prohibiting openly gay soldiers. That policy conflicts with the university's longstanding antidiscrimination policies. Bradley Epps, a Harvard literature professor and faculty adviser to a gay students' group, calls the military's practice "inconsistent with a liberal education and regime of tolerance and openness."
When the military's policy toward gay soldiers came under fire in 1995, Harvard's faculty voted to cut off all university funding to ROTC. Since then, to keep the program going, alumni donors have given about $150,000 a year to pay for MIT's overhead costs in training Harvard students. ROTC programs offer up to four-year scholarships, generally in exchange for four years of full-time military service as an officer after graduation.
Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz says faculty and students generally support Harvard's stand, while alumni -- and much of the public -- don't understand why the university would want to distance itself from the armed forces.
"It's a terrible tragedy when the military is in conflict with the academy," he says. But "Harvard must maintain its principles. It can't bow to the military on the question of discrimination."
At Harvard, the top-ranking Army cadet this semester is senior Elliott Neal, who grew up in Camdenton, Mo., a one-stoplight town in the Ozarks. More than a dozen of his high-school classmates enlisted. Mr. Neal says he views the Army as a form of public service, though he also appreciates the full Harvard scholarship.
He says fellow Harvard students often treat him as a curiosity. "Gosh, you don't seem like you want to shoot people," Mr. Neal, 21, recalls being told recently.
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Charles Cromwell, 24, a former Harvard Army ROTC student commander, says a cheering crowd of 200 greeted his plane when he touched down in Texas for a recent leave from the infantry in Iraq. Kids asked for his autograph, and women hugged him. At home in Missoula, Mont., soldiers on leave packed the stands of a college football game. An ROTC contingent fired a cannon when the home team scored a touchdown.
Later, in Massachusetts, he was a spectator at the Harvard-Yale football game, where he couldn't help noticing the lack of uniforms, or any hint of wartime. "It's reasonable to ask for a color guard," he said in a telephone interview from Iraq.
Attitudes may be shifting. At Columbia, a university task force is now considering a return of ROTC. Students in Army ROTC now travel by subway from Manhattan to the Bronx to drill at Fordham University. Next month, Yale College Republicans, a student group, plans to launch a bring-back-ROTC petition campaign, with a goal of 2,000 signatures. At Harvard, an alumni group called Advocates for Harvard ROTC has intensified its own campaign since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The group has gathered 1,800 signatures.
"What are they waiting for -- a bomb during the Harvard-Yale game?" asks David Clayman, a member of Harvard's class of 1938, and the advocates' chairman. Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, a Harvard graduate and another member of the advocates, says his alma mater seems to regard the military "as some kind of disease to be avoided to show how intellectually superior you are."
Although some in the Pentagon want to re-establish ROTC on elite campuses, others in the military wonder whether Ivy League schools will actually produce that many cadets, given prevailing attitudes. Under Defense Department guidelines, a four-year program must produce at least 15 commissioned officers a year to remain viable. A full detachment costs about $500,000 a year to sustain, although the military is considering a cheaper satellite office at Harvard.
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Advocates of Ivy League ROTC say it isn't merely a matter of numbers. Frederic Cook, a New York City compensation consultant and member of the Defense Business Board, which advises Mr. Rumsfeld, says Ivy League schools have a strong record in attracting outstanding minority students, a group the military seeks for high-ranking positions. Three Ivies -- Cornell, Princeton and University of Pennsylvania -- already have on-campus ROTC.
"What does make the Ivy League appealing is simply the fact that it's good for the military to position itself amid all quarters of society," says Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary for military personnel policy. "And we are somewhat less well-liked and less productive in recruiting in the Northeast and on the West Coast. It's been that way for years."
ROTC enrollment is rising, though it is far below the level of the Vietnam era, when many signed on as a way of avoiding the draft. More than 52,000 are now enrolled in ROTC programs, up from 48,000 in 2000. Many credit feelings of patriotism engendered by the Sept. 11 attacks.
But Brown currently has only two cadets, who travel a couple of miles to Providence College for Army ROTC. At Yale, the three Air Force cadets must drive 75 miles to the University of Connecticut at Storrs. "I bet we lose three to five a year" because of the inconvenience, says Jerry Hill, Yale's ROTC adviser.
One day recently, Justin Elliott, a Yale senior and Air Force ROTC student commander on the UConn campus, picked up a rental car to drive more than an hour to Storrs. In his crisp olive flight suit, he walked by a war memorial honoring Yale alumni. "It's amazing to think how many graduates had fought and died," he says.
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Mr. Elliot plans a symposium at Yale next spring to stir up interest in the armed forces. Its topic: "Is the military an acceptable career path at the Ivy League?"
At Harvard, President Summers has taken steps to tell students the answer is yes. He is a former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, which came up with the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that bars the armed services from asking about sexual orientation but prohibits anyone who is openly gay from serving.
In public statements, Mr. Summers has stressed his pride in Harvard ROTC cadets. He has made it a practice to speak at ROTC commissioning ceremonies and, last spring, mentioned by name those serving in Iraq. Harvard now lets ROTC send mailings to students, and it allows cadets to appear in uniform in the yearbook.
Margaret Barusch, co-chair of Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance, says she notices more uniforms on campus and wonders whether Harvard is laying the groundwork to welcome back cadets. Ms. Barusch, a Harvard junior, worries about what she calls Mr. Summers's "unofficial support" of ROTC.
"We're not convinced Larry Summers would go to bat for us," she says. "He's shown so much sympathy for ROTC."
To Ivy League cadets, a return has historical resonance. Among the earliest students of King's College, the name under which Columbia was founded in 1754, was Alexander Hamilton, who rose to prominence as a Revolutionary War hero and aide-de-camp to George Washington.
At Yale, freshmen dorms surround a statue of Nathan Hale (class of 1773), executed by the British and credited with the parting words: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
Lt. Tuohey, the Army lieutenant in Baghdad who graduated from Harvard in 2001, draws inspiration from his great-uncle, a U.S. Army first lieutenant who died in France during World War II.
"I've learned more in Iraq than I learned during four years at Harvard," Lt. Tuohey says in a telephone interview. "There's no greater honor than leading men in defense of your country."
Write to John Hechinger at john.hechinger@wsj.com1
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