ROTC?

If you had asked me yesterday whether I favor having ROTC on campus I would have said yes. (I say that even though I attended military school — only one of the many skeletons in my closet — and have some experience with ROTC.) If you ask me today, now that I’ve read Peter Beinart’s defense of that position in the New Republic, I’m not so sure.

Beinart wants Hillary Clinton to march directly to Columbia University and take advantage of a “Sister Souljah” opportunity by urging President Bollinger (of Michigan preferences fame) and Provost Brinkley to abandon their opposition and accomodate the majority of students who would like to see ROTC re-instated. (For Bollinger, who is willing to practice racial discrimination with abandon to promote “diversity,” the sight of men and women on campus in uniform, preparing to defend their country, would apparently be too discomfiting.)

I think Beinart has a point; that would be a smart thing for Hillary to do. It is Beinart’s argument that doing so would not be just politically savvy but also The Right Thing To Do that I find troubling.

For 90 years, ROTC has been a barometer of relations between America’s elite universities and American society. In 1916, when Congress created a national system of military training on campus, East Coast, liberal arts colleges clamored to be included. As historian Michael Neiberg notes, Ivy League universities were so fearful that ROTC would be confined to land-grant schools in the South and West, giving them “a monopoly on patriotism,” that students at Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale circulated a petition demanding that they be allowed to participate as well. And they succeeded. By 1955, every member of the Ivy League boasted its own ROTC detachment. At its height, Columbia graduated almost as many naval officers as the Naval Academy. But, in the late ’60s, under pressure from the campus left, most Ivy League schools expelled ROTC. And, when Richard Nixon abolished the draft–which many people joined ROTC in order to avoid–the program lost even more luster. Today, if students at Harvard, Columbia, Brown, or Yale want to join the anime society or the frisbee team, they can do so on campus. But, if they want to serve their country, they must take the bus across town.

….

Politically, it’s a no-brainer. The national Democratic Party grew alienated from the U.S. military at exactly the time liberal campuses began expelling ROTC. A public call for its restoration could help undermine the anti-military stereotype that still plagues the party today.

But demanding ROTC’s restoration would be far more than a sop to conservative swing voters; it would signify the resurgence of a certain kind of liberalism. As Neiberg shows in his book, Making Citizen Soldiers, early-twentieth-century university administrators believed ROTC served a fundamentally liberal purpose. It infused the military with the spirit of intellectual openness found in the academy and thus “prevent[ed] the creation” of a narrow, isolated “military caste.” When the New Left attacked ROTC during the Vietnam years, it was precisely this vision of liberal patriotism that it was trying to destroy. Groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) didn’t want to reform and humanize the U.S. military; they wanted the military to be as reactionary and isolated as possible so Americans would grow alienated from it….

Sounds good, at first, but hold on a minute. What if this vision of the relationship between the universities and the military proves accurate? That is, what if ROTC is restored at Columbia and elsewhere, and as as result the military does become “infused … with the spirit of intellectual openness found in the academy”?

The “spirit of intellectual openness” found on most elite campuses today almost makes the commenters on Daily Kos seem tolerant and openminded. Do we really want the officer corps infused with the spirit of today’s “academy,” which is increasingly difficult to distinsuish from MoveOn.org.?