Columbia ROTC Coverage 2010-present

2010:

• 9 January 2010 New York Times article "From Battlefield to Ivy League, on the G.I. Bill".  Note:  The article highlights how Columbia University "more than any other Ivy League institution has thrown out a welcome mat for returning servicemen and women. There are 210 veterans across the university, integrating a campus whose image-defining moment in the past half-century was of violent protests against the Vietnam War."  Columbia actively recruits veterans, and its School of General Studies "now counts 88 veterans with G.I. benefits among the 1,330 students" and the infusion of federal funding "is proving to be a bonanza for universities."  At Columbia, as the Yellow Ribbon Program ramps up, "Twenty to 25 more veterans are expected to arrive at the School of General Studies in the spring, and [School of General Studies] Dean Awn predicted that the overall number would grow “by 60 or 75 a year.”  Columbia has set aside $1.2 million for Yellow Ribbon students for the current academic year, while the government is expected to pay $5 million on behalf of veterans attending under the new G.I. Bill, not including the housing allowances."
• 22 January 2010 Stanford Review article "Initiative to Increase Understanding of U.S. Military".  Note:  The Truman Service Initiative aims to educate college students who are likely to become leaders about the nation’s armed forces.  The initiative has programs at Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Yale.  One subject that came up during a "Military 101" lecture at Stanford was making it easier for students to do ROTC.  "Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service currently offers monetary support for car rentals to ROTC members, who need to drive to neighboring educational institutions to undergo training".
• 3 February 2010 RT Network Alyona Show segment "Ivy League Cadets".  Note:  Columbia University ROTC student John McClellan is interviewed about whether the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" law being discussed in Congress would result in ROTC programs returning to elite colleges.
• 17 February 2010 Columbia Spectator column "On the front lines of prejudice: In reality, the military is merely the means through which the political and cultural climate at home displays itself" by Derek Turner.  Note:  Turner says that one benefit of restoring ROTC at Columbia would be to allow the military a local voice "so that we can engage it in discussion... having ROTC on campus would open the door to having a new group of students at Columbia who could contribute a meaningful voice to campus."
• 18 February 2010 Columbia spectator op-ed "Don’t wait, don’t stall" by Robert McCaughey.  Note:  The Barnard history professor advises: "Had the University Senate in 2006, after a special committee divided equally on its recommendation, voted differently on the proposal to lift the ban (the vote was 53 to 10 to continue the ban), Columbia would be in a strong position to lead the call for the elimination of DADT. But by acting now to lift the ban before what is already shaping up as a partisan donneybrook would at least give all Columbians the right to take part in it without the burden of having to apologize for a university policy that is neither right nor smart."
• 26 March 2010 Secure Nation blog item "Why Are Schools Afraid? The Controversy Over ROTC On Campus" by Catherine Miller.  Note:  A veteran and Columbia MPA student observes "Veterans are valued because the personal development that occurs as a result of military service cannot be duplicated anywhere else in our society. So why do these same prestigious universities (i.e.: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, and Columbia) ban ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) on their campuses? "  She notes the controversy over the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law, and suggests "In order to survive in a democracy, compromises are made to establish organizations and to move forward with “good enough” policies."
• 9 April 2010 Eric's Learning Curve blog item "Letter to my fellow advocates for Columbia ROTC".  Note:  One of the leaders of the 2002-2005 effort to get Columbia to welcome ROTC argues for the importance of a vision of high-quality ROTC that will convince both the military and the university that re-engaging with each other is worthwhile.  He advises showing how "Columbia's global perspective matches military's global perspective", emphasizing the "precious opportunity to create a new forward-thinking innovative program that draws upon world-class university resources and top-quality students in a global city", and pointing out that Columbia has the "largest population of student-veterans in the Ivy League".
• 18 April 2010 Remarks of Admiral Mike Mullen and Columbia President Lee Bollinger.  Note: Admiral Mullen said that ROTC representation from universties in the Northeast would "be of great benefit to both the universities as well as the military, as well as the country" but cautioned that "we’re limited into where we get our accessions and how many we can create".  President Bollinger said that the "don't ask, don't tell" law "has really been the crucial divide" between the university and ROTC, but he cited "enormous opportunities ...for rebuilding the relationship between American universities and the military".
• 9 May 2010 Second Line of Defense article "Close the Open Wound on Vets: End the Ban on ROTC  at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia Effective Memorial Day 2010" by John Wheeler.  Note:  Discussing discrimination against gays in the military and ROTC in universities, Wheeler notes "There is no systematic evidence that the majority of gays in the military and gay vets want fellow military personnel in ROTC stigmatized to end the stigma on gays.  Stigmatizing one group of youngsters in order to de-stigmatize another group is self-defeating and a policy oxymoron."
• 28 June 2010 Secure Nation blog item "Capabilities and Capacity: ROTC at Columbia University and the 21st Century officer corps" by Eric Chen.  Note:  Chen, one of the leaders of the ROTC and veterans' movements when he was a student at Columbia, assembles the evidence that universities such as Columbia are an excellent fit with the skills that the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review identifies as needed.
• 2 July 2010 Best Defense blog comment "Why Does Everyone Miss the Obvious? It's Recruiting!".  Note:  Jumping into a discussion "Where is the next generation of generals?", the commenter ascribes the issue to recruiting: "We've tilted our ROTC footprint to the south and disproportionately placed those resources at mediocre institutions. 10 Army ROTC units in Alabama and 9 in Georgia with only 2 in NYC and 3 in NJ."
• 4 July 2010 Washington Post op-ed "Army ROTC needs more boots on more campuses" by John Renehan.  Note:  "In the past two decades, the Army has shrunk the resources devoted to its Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs -- a primary source of new officers -- at colleges in a number of states and large urban areas. According to public Army documents, the reductions were particularly sharp in the Northeast, which had 50 ROTC programs in 1987. That number is down to 27 today... officers in charge of recruiting have said that it is cheaper to recruit cadets in places such as Texas and Alabama. The costs of expanding ROTC in places such as New York are excessive, they have said, and universities there have insufficient space or are not very welcoming... ROTC programs thrived for decades in New York before being closed by the Army during the 1980s and '90s. The City University of New York system, for example, 50 years ago commissioned as many new Army officers as any school except West Point."
• 4 July 2010 Secure Nation blog post "ROTC in New York City: An Untapped Resource" by Sean Wilkes.  Note: Wilkes presents the evidence for the military under-investing in ROTC programs in New York.  He notes how New York is the nation's largest importer of college students but has very few ROTC programs and these are far from the bulk of college students.
• 9 July 2010 Operation Warrior Forge blog item "Veteran Soldier’s quest leads him to LDAC".  Note:  John McClelland enlisted in the Army to become a medic in 2003 and went on to serve in the Army's storied 75th Ranger Regiment.  After his enlistment came to an end he became an ROTC student at Columbia University.  "He’s currently seventy five percent through writing his first fiction novel on combat, tentatively titled, “The War In Glorious Technicolor,” that follows some disillusioned Army privates on a vigilante vision-quest through Afghanistan in a stolen humvee in search of the notorious Osama Bin Laden."
• 14 August 2010 Secure Nation blog item "Needs of the Nation: ROTC at Columbia University and the Quadrennial Defense Review, Part II" by Eric Chen.  Note:  Chen quotes from the Department of Defense's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to illustrate the investment potential of having ROTC at Columbia University, with extensive links to relevant Columbia capabilities.
• 26 Augst 2010 Time Magazine article "Is ROTC Poised for a Comeback at Elite Colleges?"  Note:  "Michael Segal, a Harvard graduate and member of the coalition group Advocates for ROTC, argues that for schools like Stanford and Columbia, which have strong engineering programs, the benefits of bringing ROTC to these campuses could outweigh the costs of maintaining what will likely be smaller units there. "It may look on paper that these schools get half as much value as ROTC does at other programs, but we need some of these people," he says. "We need very thoughtful people in the military.""  In addition to the Ivy-based units mentioned in the article, Penn also has on campus Naval ROTC.
• 13 September 2010 Columbia Spectator op-ed "America needs ROTC at Columbia: Restoring the ROTC to Columbia will benefit cadets, the U.S. military, and the University community at large" by Eric Chen.  Note:  Chen, one of the leaders of the ROTC movement when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, used the Department of Defense's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to illustrate why Columbia graduates are crucial to the military.
• 17 September 2010 Columbia Spectator article "USenate not ready to consider ROTC with ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ still uncertain: DADT has been at the heart of the ROTC discussion for the past several years."  Note:  Pro-ROTC University Senator Prof. James Applegate predicted that the University Senate would wait to see what happens about gays in the military, and said “My personal guess is that if you got rid of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and said ‘Do you want ROTC back?,’ the vote would be overwhelmingly ‘yes.’”
• 20 September 2010 Columbia Spectator article "With expected repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ CU braces for ROTC debate: If “don’t ask, don’t tell” is thrown out, USenate members want to be sure students have their say about ROTC’s possible return to Columbia."  Note: “We don’t want to be caught off-guard. We don’t want ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ to be repealed and then be handed something that says, ‘ROTC is coming back,’” said Andrew Springer, a student senator from the Columbia Journalism School. “We are crafting a strategy. We haven’t fully fleshed it out yet, but we know we want to get student opinion on this, so we want to hold hearings. We are willing to do polls and surveys.”
• 22 September 2010 Columbia Spectator advertisement "Faculty for a Reserve Officers Training Corps Program at Columbia".  Note:  Eighteen Columbia faculty members look past an anticipated reform of "Don't ask, don't tell" and "address the substantive case for ROTC" and declare that "A civil-military gap caused by mutual incomprehension is undesirable".  All signers agreed that "Provided that legislative prohibition of military service by open homosexuals is ended and ROTC is subject to the same academic procedures as govern other programs, we support the establishment of an ROTC program."
• 22 September 2010 Columbia Spectator article "USenate members seek ROTC feedback despite ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ repeal delay: The controversial policy has been at the center of on-campus debates about the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps—twice halting initiatives to invite the program to Columbia".  Note:  Despite the filibuster of action on the military bill the previous day in the US Senate, the Columbia University Senate "is staying on track—seeking student feedback, but holding off any resolution until “don’t ask, don’t tell” is officially repealed".
• 23 September 2010 Yale Daily News article "At Columbia, a push for ROTC despite setbacks".  Note:  "Two Columbia students have organized an intercollegiate conference in early October to discuss the return of ROTC programs to campuses that have banned them. The students began organizing the conference before Tuesday’s vote with the hope that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would be repealed. While they deemed the Wednesday’s vote of the policy a setback, they said they still hope to energize different campuses to bring back ROTC if it is later repealed.  For Columbia College student and ROTC advocate John McClelland, getting ROTC units at more Ivy League universities is symbolic of the military developing a more inclusive culture. A former Army medic who served in Afghanistan, McClelland said he was exposed to a larger diversity of opinions and values when he came to study at Columbia. If the military could train its cadets at Ivy League schools, with their more inclusive cultures, future officers might make the armed forces more friendly toward gays and lesbians, he added.“If you are a gay soldier, you want a commander who is not biased against somebody because that commander had gay friends in college,” McClelland said. Columbia sociology professor emeritus Allan Silver, an Army veteran who co-wrote a statement supporting ROTC’s return that 20 Columbia professors published in the Spectator, the campus newspaper, said ROTC programs need to adapt to the liberal arts curriculum at institutions such as Columbia, Harvard and Yale... Silver and his colleagues promote a new approach to integrating ROTC into the university curriculum, one that incorporates a broader scope of academic disciplines.  “In this age, it’s not bad for military officers to know some anthropology, some languages, some ethics,” he said. “All of that is the core of the liberal arts.”... At Yale, University Secretary Linda Lorimer said she does not know how quickly ROTC would return if “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” were repealed. The program must be first studied and reviewed by the faculty and office of the University before it could come back to Yale, she said in an interview Wednesday evening."
• 27 September 2010 Minding the Campus article "ROTC Back in the News" by John Leo.  Note:  Leo gives a short history of the ROTC issue in light of the clash on the issue between Harvard President Drew Faust and Senator Scott Brown.  He mentioned the 2005 Columbia University Senate vote on ROTC - the student votes were 13 against and 8 absent.
• 29 September 2010 Columbia Spectator article "Bollinger focuses on M’ville in fireside chat".  Note: "Bollinger also fielded questions on his personal views on the potential return of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to campus. Bollinger said he and many others in the University Senate are troubled by the discriminatory practices of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.“Of course I value the military enormously, but I do not think that as part of our academic program we should have a program that discriminates against any of our students,” he said, adding that the ROTC’s return will have to be re-evaluated if “don’t ask, don’t tell” is eliminated."   The article made no mention of whether lifting of Columbia's ban would require 100% of military to be open to non-heterosexuals and whether the openness would need to include all groups included in its non-discrimination policy.
• 2 October 2010 "Brief Remarks About the ROTC and Columbia" by Dean M. M. Moody-Adams.  Note: The dean of Columbia College was traveling on Columbia business on the day of the Columbia Service & Society Conference but these remarks of hers were read at the conference.  She stressed the importance of creating "a pool of highly skilled military leaders who are trained in non-military institutions—institutions that teach them about the complexity of human experience" and asked "what if an elite liberal arts education proved especially likely to create leaders who understand what it takes to turn others into citizen soldiers? What if having an official ROTC presence at a school like Columbia might be a valuable and reliable means of ensuring the creation of citizen soldiers?"  She went on to envision how Columbia and ROTC could interact after reform of "Don't ask, don't tell": "Would it mean something special for an ROTC student to have his or her service as a citizen soldier given a new kind of recognition on Columbia’s campus? Might it increase the numbers of Columbia students who sign up for ROTC, and hence increase the chances for interaction between students who choose military service and those who do not? How might the resulting changes add to the diversity of the Columbia experience - and might we all come to appreciate more about the diversity of opinions among students who choose military service? Might faculty be able to play a role in helping to shape the perceptions of democratic needs and interests of the men and women who go on to be leaders in the military? In short, might it be good for the undergraduate experience of ROTC and non-ROTC students alike if the ROTC were to make an official “return” to Columbia? ... I invite you to consider whether the right question may no longer be “How could we ever formally recognize ROTC on our campus,” but, instead, “How can we not welcome them back?”"
• 2 October 2010 American Council of Trustees and Alumni Speech by Anne Neal at Columbia Service & Society Conference.  Note:  ACTA president Anne Neal said "Each campus will need to ask itself tough questions. For example: What kind of presence do we want ROTC to have—an office, a building, a website? ... Are there ways that Columbia and other institutions might develop rigorous offerings in such fields as military history, anthropology, and game theory ...that would create ROTC programs commensurate with the outstanding academic programs of our greatest universities? ... there is a documented and disturbing dearth of courses on military and diplomatic history in elite and major universities. At Harvard today there is not one explicitly military history course offered this year or planned in the near future in the history department. There is only one course dedicated explicitly to US foreign relations. Out of 48 history faculty members, including visiting faculty, none are explicitly focused on foreign policy, diplomatic history or military history. Of Stanford’s full time history faculty, zero are focused on diplomatic or military history. At Brown, there are no courses focused on military history, and no faculty focused on diplomatic or military history, although there is one faculty member who is “probing the politics of knowing about and interacting with birds.”
• 4 October 2010 New York Post op-ed "Every color but camo: Campus bigotry a social threat" by Glenn Harlan Reynolds.  Note:  Reynolds notes how top colleges promote diversity as a central value, yet distance themselves from students in ROTC.  He notes that "Expansive federal powers to solve social ills are widely supported at our "top tier" universities, and we have reached the point where virtually everything is potentially subject to federal control" and the federal government "can surely act to integrate our institutions of higher learning, even if their leaders choose to stand in the schoolhouse door".
• 6 October 2010 Cub Pub (Columbia Political Union) blog post "Don't Ask Don't Tell, ROTC, and Columbia".  Note:  The post describes the 2 October Service and Society conference at Columbia, which focused on looking past the "Don't ask, don't tell" issue and "dealt with exploring the connections between universities and the military, the different educational opportunities they present students, and a reconciliation of those perspectives of campus".
• 6 October 2010 Columbia Spectator column "Forgetting war and peace issues: Making sure we take a larger stance on war and peace " by Sam Klug.  Note:  Klug discusses the 2 October Service and Society conference at Columbia and describes how a World War I era course on "War Issues" evolved into the Contemporary Civilization course.  He urges Columbia to look beyond the war-related issues that affect Columbia directly, such as ROTC and DADT, and address "broader questions about the wars we’re fighting, why we’re fighting them, and what we gain and lose from them".
• 6 October 2010 Columbia Spectator "BloggerHeads" feature "Should ROTC return?".  Note:  James Dawson observes that "ROTC is a passive issue for most students, something that they really wouldn’t care about either way. What sends them over the edge is the DADT element."  Derek Turner argues that engaging with the military is a more effective way to influence it than opposing laws such as "Don't ask, don't tell" without having served.
• 19 October 2010 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ESC: Whispers of ROTC".  Note:  "Senator Tim Qin said that the Senate may be reviving the ROTC issue."
• 20 October 2010 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ROTC: For Your Edification".  Note: The item links to two background documents on ROTC programs, but some of the information in the documents is wrong and contradictory. For example, one says Yale gives course credit and another says it does not. Also, Yale now has a cross-town Army ROTC opportunity at the University of New Haven. 
• 23 October 2010 Columbia spectator article "Quick hits from the USenate meeting".  Note:  Columbia President Lee Bollinger announced spoke about ROTC at a University Senate meeting.  "“I think we are all aware that the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ provision happily appears to be destined to go away. I think we have many members of our community who want to participate in activities on campus, and we should support them in doing so to the extent that it’s consistent with our University policies and values.” He added that any future decisions about ROTC or military presence on campus should come through the USenate Executive Committee and to expect news on that front."
• 1 November 2010 Secure Nation blog item "Re-legitimizing ROTC" by Michael Segal.  Note:  The Webmaster of Advocates for ROTC discusses the 25 October New York Times op-ed on ROTC, and after referring to many of the original sources observes "Leaving out the 1964 law from the history of ROTC in the 1960s is a serious omission since it ignores the fact that many top colleges knowingly removed the legal basis for ROTC, and thereby left the military no option under the law but to leave.  However, we should also credit top colleges with planting the seeds for the enhanced “ROTC+” programs of the future.  There is much value in the ROTC+ vision of high quality courses with joint university and ROTC credit, whether taught by regular faculty or ROTC commanders."
• 11 November 2010 Callie Crossley Show radio interviews "Thinking Out Loud: ROTC And The Ivy League".  Note:  Crossley interviews Advocates for Columbia ROTC founder Sean Wilkes and Prof. Diane Mazur, who both make the case for the importance of having ROTC at elite colleges. 
• 12 November 2010 Columbia Spectator article "ROTC members raise flag, break ban".  Note:  The students "will continue to perform flag-raising ceremonies every Monday at dawn, after Columbia’s University Senate gave them the green light last month... Staff Sergeant and University Senator Jose Robledo, GS, said that he and others have been lobbying the University Senate, University President Lee Bollinger, and Public Safety for permission to reinstate these ceremonies since May." 
• 14 November 2010 Columbia Spectator editorial "Red, white and Columbia blue: What a flag-raising ceremony says about Columbia's attitude towards the military."  Note:  Columbia's student newspaper sees the granting of permission for a flag raising ceremony by students dressed in their military uniforms as a step towards reversing what it refers to as a "ban" on "all military activities on campus".  This is not strictly true, as Columbia never formally banned ROTC; it just knowingly removed the legal basis for ROTC.  Also, students have long been able to appear on campus in uniform and urge fellow students to join the military.  And although Columbia students don't get credit for ROTC courses taken at other schools, the same applies for Army and Air Force ROTC students at Harvard, and applies even at Princeton, which has its own Army ROTC program. See letter on 30 November in response.
• 29 November 2010 Columbia Spectator op-ed "A case for ROTC at Columbia: Accepting the program here may attract wealthier students to the military" by Allan Silver.  Note:  Prof. Silver argues that the switch to an all volunteer military instead of conscription makes it crucial to have a way to attract higher socioeconomic status students to the military.  "If a democracy contemplates or goes to war, all groups should bear its prospective and real sacrifices. Columbia’s students ... have little skin in the nation’s military service and its wars and little contact with those who do.  It is a civic scandal that those with higher prospects in the society and economy are egregiously underrepresented in military service ... We should actively encourage ROTC’s return to the Northeast, large cities, and elite universities—all combined in our case. "
• 29 November 2010 Columbia Spectator op-ed "A farewell to homogeneity: Columbia's acceptance of ROTC can bring diversity much needed in the student body" by Allison Dilyard.  Note:  A junior at Barnard writes "Why would ROTC be a relief? Because we need some diversity here. What we have now is a majority of naively liberal kids who all seem to be from California and the tri-state area. If we had ROTC on campus again, there would almost definitely be a stronger presence of students from the middle states, which would be such a relief from what sometimes seems to be an overwhelming single-mindedness of the super-liberal coasts."
• 29 November 2010 Columbia Spectator op-ed "My life as an army ROTC cadet and Barnard student: Balancing a Fordham ROTC-Barnard workload can be tough, but also very rewarding" by Natalie Lopez-Barnard.  Note:  "ROTC has been the vehicle for my leadership training, and it can easily consume more than 20 hours of my time a week. This program has shown me my mental and physical strengths as well as my limitations, and with this awareness, I am a more capable person. My training has instilled within me higher standards of self-discipline that motivate me to accomplish goals... Barnard College is an educational institution that prides itself on developing female leaders. As the first student cadet from Barnard to complete the Army ROTC program, I will soon be the first officer of the U.S. Army from Barnard College. "
• 29 November 2010 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Pursuing freedom without letting go of equality: Having the military on campus offers much to Columbia—it's also problematic" by Barry Weinberg.  Note:  The outreach coordinator for Everyone Allied Against Homophobia writes "The exclusion of, at times, racial minorities, women, and, currently, LGBT individuals from serving in the military does not merely deprive the military of valuable human capital in its goal of protecting our society, but it is antithetical to the values in our society that make it worth protecting."
• 30 November 2010 Columbia Spectator article "Student cadets push for accommodations: Some students say Columbia should provide more support for cadets participating in ROTC programs".  Note:  Students describe problems getting permission to move into dorm rooms early enough for ROTC orientation or get Physical Education credit for their ROTC training, but administration officials say that both should have been granted.  Other colleges such as Harvard and Yale have given particular administration officials responsibility for coordination with ROTC students, with resulting improvements on such issues.
• 30 November 2010 Columbia Spectator letter "Referring to the restriction on ROTC as a "ban" is misleading" by Allan Silver.  Note:  A Professor Emeritus of Sociology discusses a 14 November Spectator editorial and observes that "It is more accurate to say that these institutions effectively barred ROTC by requiring changes in its curriculum, credit arrangements, and commanding officers’ faculty status. In the charged atmosphere of the time, the strict application of existing legislation made it impossible for the military services to accept these changes... Today, ROTC programs at MIT, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania have resolved many or all of the curricular problems of four decades ago. After the repeal or effective reform of legal prohibitions against service by homosexuals, cooperative good will by Columbia and the military can resolve the remaining obstacles."
• 1 December 2010 Columbia Spectator letter "Columbia and ROTC are incompatible" by Herbert J.Gans.  Note:  A Professor Emeritus of Sociology writes that "ROTC is in part a leadership training program for the killing of other people and the destruction of their societies".
• 18 December 2010 Weekly Standard blog item "Gays in the Military, ROTC back on Campus? Time to end to that discrimination, too." by William Kristol.  Note:  "One trusts the presidents and trustees of colleges that have been keeping ROTC at arm's length, allegedly because of DADT, will move posthaste to ensure a hearty welcome and full equality for ROTC at their universities... One would hope that prominent individuals, like Yale alum Joe Lieberman, who played so crucial a role in ending DADT, would lose no time in writing president Richard Levin to urge the re-installing of ROTC at Yale, that Crimson alums like Chuck Schumer will be in touch with Harvard president Drew Faust, and that Columbia graduate Barack Obama will weigh in with Fair Columbia's Lee Bollinger."
• 18 December 2010 Columbia Spectator blog item "Bollinger signals possible lift on ROTC ban".  Note:  The president of Columbia University said that the US Senate vote to repeal "Don't ask, don't tell" provides “the opportunity for a new era in the relationship between universities and our military services... This is a historic development for a nation dedicated to fulfilling its core principle of equal rights. It also effectively ends what has been a vexing problem for higher education, including at Columbia — given our desire to be open to our military, but not wanting to violate our own core principle against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”
• 19 December 2010 Eric's Learning Curve blog post "Quick word: With DADT repealed, return of ROTC to Columbia is next".  Note: One of the founders of the ROTC and veterans movements at Columbia looks ahead to the effort to have ROTC return to Columbia and observes "The devil is in the details: buy-in from the needed university and military decsion-makers, course credits, faculty status, campus space and facilities, recruitment, operating costs, etc., etc., etc.."  He quotes General David Petraeus, who said "Now, as anyone who has been involved in transformation knows, change can be hard. It can be challenging. And it can be frustrating. Inevitably, all institutions resist change to some degree--even when all recognize that change is needed."
• 19 December 2010 The Atlantic blog item "DADT and ROTC" by James Fallows.  Note: The repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" law "removes the last stated objection to the return of ROTC programs to on-campus operations at Harvard and some other elite universities  ... It is time for Harvard, which took an early lead in removing ROTC programs in the Vietnam era, to set an example in bringing them back."
• 19 December 2010 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ROTC on Campus: Past, Present and Future".  Note:  A detailed chronology of the ROTC issue at Columbia is provided.  The comments add a lot of crucial context and detail.
• 20 December 2010 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "University Senate Creates ROTC Task Force".  Note:  "The Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate has just announced that it will form a task force on ROTC starting in the spring semester in light of yesterday’s DADT repeal." The press release is quoted in full and also available here.
• 20 December 2010 Columbia Spectator blog item "USenate establishes task force to evaluate ROTC".  Note:  The press release is quoted in full and also available here.
• 20 December 2010 Politico column "Universities and the military" by Ben Smith.  Note: Smith observes a "very deliberate attempt by administrators, most of them shaped by the '60s, not to repeat what most on the left now see as a key mistake of that era, the hostility not just toward a war but to the soldiers. Columbia has been particularly aggressive on that front, recruiting recent veterans to study at the school and, earlier this year, hosting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at Columbia."  
• 21 December 2010 Wall Street Journal column "The Army and the Ivy: Now that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is no more, President Obama can follow up by seeing that elite universities welcome the military back to campus" by William McGurn.  Note:  McGurn offers advice to President Obama on his State of the Union address "When you take the victory lap you are entitled to for ending the prohibition on gays serving openly in the military, follow up with a call to end the remaining discrimination faced by members of our military—the second-class status of Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadets on some of our leading college campuses... But it's not just the Harvards and Columbias that need encouragement here. Alas, the Pentagon could use a little prodding, too. The dirty little secret is that our military brass has been too willing to abandon whole swaths of America (mostly in the Northeast and urban areas) where they find recruitment more difficult."  See letters in response.
• 22 December 2010 New York Times article "Elite Colleges Rethink Ties to R.O.T.C. After ‘Don’t Ask’ Repeal".  Note:  The number of students at elite colleges doing ROTC at other colleges is: Harvard 19, Columbia 6, Yale 4, Brown 1, and Stanford 15.  Harvard is the only one to have cross-town Army, Navy and Air Force opportunities nearby.
• 22 December 2010 Columbia Spectator article "New USenate task force may reconsider military on campus".  Note:  "Next semester, the Task Force on Military Engagement plans to hold hearings, conduct a survey regarding Reserve Officers Training Corps, and serve as an educational resource about the military’s history with Columbia".
• 22 December 2010 ABC News article "Repeal of Gay Ban Opens Door to ROTC Return at Top Schools".  Note:  "Allowing ROTC to operate on-campus would also facilitate integration the nation's top students into military leadership roles and potentially broaden connections between military decision-makers and other high-profile alumni from the elite schools, advocates say. "The alternative is a civil-military divide, and you get situations like people who've trained in Ivy League institutions or places like Stanford who are represented in leadership of the country but who don't have friends in the military, or they don't know enough about the military to manage it properly, or just have discussions about military-related issues," said Michael Segal, founder and director of Advocates for ROTC, an umbrella group promoting the return of the military program to top colleges and universities.... Eric Chen, a recent Columbia graduate and Army veteran, said the military and universities need to understand the mutual benefits of bringing ROTC back to all schools in the Ivy League. "In an increasingly complex global security environment, America needs military leaders able to adapt on a full spectrum, which means officers who are creative critical thinkers and lifelong learners with the best possible academic foundation," he said. "Columbia already hosts innovative cross-cutting programs that rely upon the special reach and multi-dimensional resources of a global flagship university in a world city."" The article notes that "skeptics have questioned whether there would be enough student interest to merit the time and resources of bringing ROTC back. Chen said the military and university administrators need to give students a chance. "You first have to plant the seed in order to grow the tree," he said. "Building the cadet population at Columbia first requires ROTC on campus. Then, as Columbia ROTC is nurtured into a fully integrated member of the university, the cadet population will grow over time.""

2011:

• 1 January 2011 New York Post editorial "Time for ROTC's return".  Note:  The Post calls on Columbia University president Lee Bollinger to make moves as pro-ROTC as those by his counterparts at Harvard and Yale.
• 2 January 2011 New York Daily News editorial "Columbia and other Ivy League campuses must reopen their gates to ROTC".  Note:  "Individual students can, consistent with their conscience, be anti-war, ambivalent or eager to serve. But the institution has a responsibility to expose its students, many of whom are privileged, to the opportunity to serve their country."
• 3 January 2011 American Spectator article "Let's Ban Ivy League ROTC" by Jed Babbin.  Note: Babbin, a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, urges young people not to go to Ivy League colleges: "graduate without having your nose so stuck in the air that you believe America isn't a force for good in the world".  He also urges the military to avoid Ivy League colleges.  In reality, however, there are over 300 veterans as undergraduates at Columbia University, and smaller numbers at other top colleges.
• 3 January 2011 Secure Nation item "Blueprint for Columbia ROTC" by Eric Chen.  Note:  Chen, one of the leaders of the 2005 ROTC effort at Columbia, outlines how Columbia's strengths, including a large undergraduate military veteran population and a strong engineering school, argue for creating an ROTC+ program at Columbia to be "the leading, state-of-the-art ROTC program in the nation".
• 4 January 2011 The Atlantic bog item "ROTC and Columbia: the Jack Wheeler Legacy" by James Fallows.  Note:  Noting the "blueprint" articles for Harvard and Columbia ROTC, Fallows observes, "Part of the reason a blueprint is necessary: resinstatement would involve significant complications and headaches on the military's side, not just for the universities, so it shouldn't be done in a slapdash way. Worth reading, along with Wheeler's own impassioned statement on the subject last spring. And worth acting on."
• 9 January 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education article "After Repeal of 'Don't Ask,' Elite Colleges Rethink ROTC".   Note:  The article discusses ways in which top colleges could provide the military with crucial skills, due to the diversity on their campuses and their ability to provide an ROTC+ experience, leveraging the expertise of their non-military faculty.
• 9 January 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education commentary "'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and ROTC's Future at Elite Colleges" by Donald Alexander Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili.  Note:  "After decades of promoting the benefits of diversity, colleges are now recognizing the contributions that military experience can make to the diversity of the intellectual and moral climate. As Peter Awn, dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, told us in an interview, "There isn't hostility toward them because they represent the military. So it's a very, very different climate. And more often than not, the traditional students find them really interesting.""  The authors note that "The same argument applies to ROTC, and we believe that many colleges will seriously consider bringing the program back. Basic civic equality called for the end of "don't ask, don't tell." It also calls for the Ivies to participate more meaningfully in the Reserve Officer Training Corps."
• 17 January 2011 Columbia Spectator column "Reevaluating ROTC: By banning ROTC, we're alienating ourselves from the realities of war" by Nick Bloom.  Note:  Bloom writes that "apathy toward the military in one of the nation’s most elite universities is perhaps the single most dangerous and irresponsible attitude that the Columbia community could take toward matters of war" and it "creates a massive class divide, desensitizing the people who will most likely be calling the shots in political matters in future decades from the realities of war—which legitimizes claims that elite universities are out of touch with mainstream America."
• 20 January 2011 Columbia Spectator article "USenate to hold town halls on ROTC, vote expected in April".  Note: The task force will do a survey of all schools that had ROTC students in the past 5 years and collect information for a report to the Senate in March but will not make a recommendation.  A vote in favor of ROTC would mean that the university would approach the military asking for an ROTC program.
• 22 January 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog post "ROTC: What to Expect This Semester".  Note:  The University Senate's ROTC taskforce "is launching a website soon, and organizing three successive town halls in February, in venues that can accommodate over 400 people ... senior administrators including Dean Moody-Adams and Provost Steele have expressed “very very strong interest” in being a part of the meetings. There will again be a student poll, open to all the undergraduate schools, and SIPA... The task force is actively soliciting community members opinions via rotc-taskforce@columbia.edu."
• 23 January 2011 Columbia Spectator column "DADT was a blessing in disguise: The DADT repeal may help the military, but it only hurts humans" by Yasmeen Ar-Rayani .  Note: "Now is the time for our community to consider how shallow our rejection of ROTC was. As anti-racist youth, we ought to focus, not on fighting inequality within the military, but on fighting a military whose very purpose it is to perpetuate inequality the world over."
• 24 January 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Columbia and ROTC: A lost generation: By banning ROTC, Columbia loses the opportunity the provide the nation with the next generation of military leaders" by Michael Christman.  Note:  An alumnus and captain in the United States Marine Corps writes "Many at Columbia still view military service as beneath them—for someone who doesn’t have any other options or can’t think on his own. This could not be further from the truth. As long as this attitude persists and our nation’s elite continue to shun military service, Columbia’s influence on many of the world’s important foreign policy questions will be restricted to campus lecture halls."
• 27 January 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Where Do We Stand Now? Eight panelists sit down to discuss ROTC's role at Columbia".  Note:  Liya Yu, a PhD student in political science said "Columbia in the past years has been remarkably internationalized. How does this international outlook actually fit with ROTC, a very national institution?"  In response to a comment by Prof. Herbert Gans that "“the best and the brightest” of Harvard brought us into the Vietnam War", Jose Robledo, an undergraduate ROTC student who served 9 years in the Army, pointed out that the "best and brightest" were policy makers. "These [ROTC men and women] that are graduating every May and every December from America’s universities [are] actually implementing those some of those hard truths—they have to be out there."
• 28 January 2011 Enterprise blog (AEI) item "Columbia University’s ROTC Debate" by Cheryl Miller.  Note:  Miller stresses the importance of having officers who can implement policy wisely.
• 28 January 2011 Columbia University Senate: Task Force on Military Engagement.  Note: The committee considering the ROTC issue launched its web site, detailing the process by which they will explore the issue, with a first hearing on 7 February.  The site also has a summary of the history of the ROTC issue at Columbia and links to some key documents.
• 2 February 2011 Memorandum for the Task Force on Military Engagement by Prof. Abraham R. Wagner.  Note:  A Columbia faculty member with three decades of national security related government service writes that having Columbia students serve in national security related areas is crucial.  "Many of the failures we have experienced in the last several years have been due to a failure to bring in well-educated young people to perform some of the most challenging analytical tasks imaginable."
• 4 February 2011 Huffington Post item "Gay Rights and University ROTC Policy" by Jonathan R. Cole.  Note:  A Columbia professor and former provost says that ROTC should not be allowed on campus because in the military "gay couples simply have not achieved equal protection under the law and they suffer sharp disparities from not being permitted to marry".
• 6 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog post "ROTC Hearings to Begin Tomorrow".  Note:  The comments will be transcribed and published on the Task Force’s website.
• 7 February 2011 Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement hearing audio recordings and transcript.  Note:  The bulk of the comments fell into three groups: veterans supporting ROTC, people opposing ROTC because openly transgender people can't serve, or opposing ROTC because students train to fight.
• 8 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Opinions mixed at USenate's first ROTC town hall".  Note:  Forty people in the audience each made brief remarks, split between those pro and anti-ROTC.  Several criticized the format.  ROTC-supporter Learned Foote CC ’11, president of the Columbia College Student Council, said he did not like that anyone could make a claim “without it being fact-checked... I think there were a lot of things that were said that were not true, and I would hope that when the task force makes its recommendations, that they consider both the feelings that were expressed today, and also the facts”.  Jose Robledo, GS, a University senator, and ROTC cadet said “For the most part, a lot of intellectual arguments that a University of this caliber is supposed to have were not had here.. A lot of those arguments [from the town hall] are regurgitations of popular rhetoric, and that was easily seen by how quickly the point-counterpoint went.”
• 8 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ROTC Hearings, Part 1: “No Catcalls, Please”".  Note:  One of the objections cited to having ROTC at Columbia is that "The military recruits among low-income areas specifically".
• 9 February 2011 Huffington Post article "The ROTC Controversy: DADT Is Repealed, but Discrimination Remains" by Noah Baron CC'11.  Note:  Baron suggests that Republicans may re-institute DADT or the military may prosecute soldiers for sodomy.
• 13 February 2011 Columbia Spectator letter "In ROTC debate, army deserves fair treatment" by Doug Kechijian.  Note:  "As unconventional warfare becomes more common, even the military’s staunchest critics should want liberally-educated, culturally-sensitive officers among those advising elected officials about security policy and, just as importantly, performing ground-level diplomacy like meeting with tribal elders in Afghanistan to implement counterinsurgency measures."
• 14 February 2011 Columbia University Task Force on Military Engagement "E-Mails to 2/13".  Note: The emails include one from Paul S. Frommer '57, who wrote that excluding ROTC "surely has helped to fulfill President Eisenhower’s remarks as to beware of a military-industrial complex. What better way than this, to segregate the American forces officer corps from the entire general public".
• 15 February 2011 Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement hearing transcript and audio.  Note:  The transcript also includes the opening speech by Columbia College Dean Michelle Moody-Adams, in which she said "I’m asking you to consider whether it might be good for the undergraduate experience of both ROTC and non-ROTC students alike if the ROTC were to make an official return to Columbia. I’m not going to answer these questions for you."
• 15 February 2011 Comments at the Columbia University ROTC Town Hall by Will Prasifka. Note:  Prasifka goes through the thought experiment of whether Columbia should an expel an organization that has some shortcomings, and make a plea for tolerance of diversity.
• 16 February 2011 Columbia spectator article "College dean speaks out in favor of ROTC:Two hundred students and faculty members turned out for the second ROTC town hall Tuesday night."  Note:  Columbia College Dean Michele Moody-Adams said that with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” the country is in a new era, and Columbia should consider finding an official place for ROTC on campus. “The right question for us is no longer how could we ever recognize ROTC formally on our campus. We’ve moved to how could we not”. She said that even if the country has not “moved as far as it could on the question of discrimination,” now is the time for Columbia to help produce “citizen soldiers” who would benefit from the Core Curriculum. "Learned Foote, CCSC ’11 and Columbia College Student Council president, said many of the people who speak publicly about ROTC have radical opinions.“I do wonder what the median Columbia student thinks about this,” he said."  See letter on 17 March.
• 16 February 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Bring back ROTC: The army's faults should not prevent us from allowing ROTC on campus" by Kaley Hanenkrat.  Note:  The president of the Columbia University College Democrats writes that "refusing to interact with the institutions that shape our country until they are perfect is not a solution. The US military is far from perfect, but problems come from bad policy—policies that can be changed by our political leaders... As we saw with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” changes that were considered virtually impossible a decade ago can be made when we work for them."
• 16 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "ROTC Hearing, Part 2: “How Can We Not Invite Them Back?”".  Note:  Arguments against ROTC were "more limited" than at the 7 February hearing, and among the anti-ROTC arguments "Transgender people are still discriminated against and barred from military, this would directly oppose Columbia’s nondiscrimination statement. This was the primary argument used throughout the night."
• 16 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "PrezBo By the Fire".  Note: Columbia president Lee Bollinger was asked by students about ROTC, and he "refused to give a personal opinion on the question. “I really don’t want to get too deep into the ROTC question because I want to see how it’s debated in the community,” he said when a second student asked about ROTC. He was so interested in hearing the opinions of the students present that he welcomed a few comments from students and then asked for a show of hands: with the understanding that no changes in curriculum would be made to accommodate ROTC, how many students would welcome ROTC back to campus? About 80% of the students raised their hands. Only a few were opposed, and an equal number declared themselves undecided." 
• 16 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "USenate Task Force on Military Engagement Releases Student Survey".  Note:  "There are general questions about the military’s relationship with Columbia, and there is a question that directly asks: I ______ of a return of ROTC to Columbia’s campuses."
• 16 February 2011 Faculty for a Reserve Officers Training Corps Program.  Note:  "The affirmative case for an ROTC program at Columbia has been crowded out by debate over legislation prohibiting military service by open homosexuals. The repeal of that legislation makes it possible to clearly state that case", which they do with 8 major points.
• 18 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Dean’s ROTC speech upsets queer groups".  Note:  Dean Michele Moody-Adams asked questions such as "what if an elite liberal arts education proved especially likely to create leaders who understand what it takes to turn others into citizen soldiers? What if having an official ROTC presence at a school like Columbia might be a valuable and reliable means of ensuring the creation of citizen soldiers?" ROTC opponents considered these to be a strong endorsement of ROTC before many students and University Senators had formed an opinion.
• 18 February 2011 Columbia spectator letter "Dean Moody-Adams responds to Spectator's coverage of the ROTC debate".  Note:  The dean of Columbia College makes clear that at the ROTC hearing she was raising questions to consider about ROTC to stimulate discussion and not to shut down discussion.  She quoted the closing words of her remarks "I invite you to consider whether the right question may no longer be ‘How could we ever formally recognize ROTC on our campus?’ but, instead, ‘How can we not welcome them back?’ Please do not shy away from this important debate.”"
• 20 February 2011 New York Post article "Hero's unwelcome: Wounded Iraq vet jeered at Columbia".  Note:  During a Town Hall meeting about ROTC a student veteran who spoke in favor of ROTC was taunted, hissed and booed.  The Post quotes Columbia ROTC student José Robledo as suggesting that such conduct towards a Purple Heart awardee has been to the detriment of their case against ROTC.
• 20 February 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Fact and judgement about ROTC: Columbia has room for ROTC and might even benefit from it" by Prof. Allan Silver.  Note:  A Columbia sociology professor writes that "America needs a military drawn from the whole nation, including its most selective institutions of higher learning, where its future leaders are exposed to the critical edge that Columbia and its sister institutions offer. We don’t want a military comfortable only in its own cultural skin and future civilian leaders with little sense of fellow citizens who serve in it."
• 20 February 2011 Columbia Spectator blog item "Task Force releases audio of veteran’s speech in ROTC hearing". Note:  A link is provided to the episode described in the 20 February NY Post article.
• 21 February 2011 Columbia University Task Force on Military Engagement E-Mails to 2/20.
• 21 February 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "Vote yes: The Editorial Board weighs in and offers its support of ROTC."  Note: Columbia's student newspaper argues that having ROTC would increase campus diversity of economic background, outlook and experience.  Addressing imperfections in the military, the editorial says "Engagement—not self-imposed segregation—is the way to reform. The military is not a company that we can boycott or a country from which we can divest—it is a vital part of our nation’s identity that cannot be ignored."
• 21 February 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "ROTC and Columbia complement each other: Both Columbia and the military can gain from partnership through ROTC" by James Cabot.  Note:  "If one hates armed conflict, then one should support a strong American military, led by the highest caliber officer corps—including officer graduates of Columbia."
• 21 February 2011 Columbia Spectator Spectrum blog item "Wounded veteran comments on audience jeers in second hearing".  Note:  Anthony Maschek wrote "Comments by a small number of individuals at the town hall meeting have not changed my positive experiences at Columbia. Thus far, my fellow students have been very interested in hearing about my past life and military experiences. Columbia has been attempting to get more veterans to share their experiences here, and the atmosphere here has been supportive despite the actions of a very small minority of the town hall participants."
• 21 February 2011 "Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement Statement on Events of February 15, 2011".  Note:  The statement points out how unusual the incivility in the 15 February Town Hall meeting was, and lists highlights of Columbia's "long history of engagement with the U.S. Armed Forces."
• 22 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Students surprised, worried by national media coverage on ROTC: Students say many got a bad rap in national media coverage".  Note:  "In a statement that he sent to the media on Monday night, Maschek said he feels no animosity towards Columbia. “Comments by a small number of individuals at the town hall meeting have not changed my positive experiences at Columbia,” Maschek wrote. “Thus far, my fellow students have been very interested in hearing about my past life and military experiences. Columbia has been attempting to get more veterans to share their experiences here, and the atmosphere here has been supportive despite the actions of a very small minority of the town hall participants.”"
• 22 February 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "Come heckle or high water: The Editorial Board responds to media coverage of ROTC hearing".  Note:  The Columbia student newspaper denounces the 20 February NY Post article as overblown, and points out the military-friendly nature of the university.
• 22 February 2011 Huffington Post article "ROTC at Columbia University: Regarding the Heckling of a Veteran" by Marco Reininger.  Note:  A veteran of the war in Afghanistan and political science major at Columbia writes that "the heckling of Anthony Maschek ... reminds people of a shameful time in this country's past when many abandoned our military and our veterans because they couldn't separate their grievances with politics from the men and women serving in uniform. Columbia was a center of protest during this period, which lent it the military hating stigma it is unsuccessfully trying to shake to this day. A stigma that in 2011 is unjustified."  He goes on to describe the very positive attitude at Columbia towards veterans.
• 22 February 2011 press release "Columbia Veterans Support University in ROTC Controversy".  Note:  A coalition of 4 veterans organizations "wish to state that the disrespectful conduct of a few individuals in no way reflects the consensus attitude of Columbia students and faculty toward the student-veteran population. On the contrary, its enthusiastic support of military veterans is precisely the reason why Columbia now hosts the largest veteran population of any Ivy League institution: 340 in total, over 200 of whom are undergraduates."
• 23 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Anti-ROTC coalition holds own discussion".  Note:  Feride Eralp, of the newly formed "Coalition Against ROTC", said that the exclusively anti-ROTC environment was necessary because the town halls “do not provide a safe space” to discuss ROTC’s return and "the administration is biased in favour of ROTC".
• 23 February 2011 Columbia University Senate Task Force on Military Engagement hearing transcript and audio. 
• 24 February 2011 Columbia Spectator article "At final ROTC town hall, some criticize process".  Note:  "Asher Levine, GSAS ’11, said he decided to support ROTC after reading some literature that an anti-ROTC group was handing out on College Walk. “They seemed like really specious arguments that confused thoughts about the military—and American foreign policy in general—with what the ROTC really is and would do on campus,” Levine said."
• 24 February 2011 Inside Higher Ed article "Roadblocks for ROTC?".  Note:  The article analyzes the issues that have emerged since the repeal of DADT.
• 24 February 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Update: Faculty Positions on ROTC".  Note:  The text is given of a statement by Columbia faculty opposed to ROTC.  The professors “hold it to be a matter of the most profound principle and educational philosophy that the idea of a university and the ethos of the military are incompatible”.  Their key reason was that the military “trains people for obedience to the chain of command, whereas the university cultivates a critical and constantly questioning consciousness”.  The statement goes on to say that the military violates Columbia's non-discrimination statement in considering physical disability and age when admitting students to ROTC programs.  See a response on 28 February and an Issues page in response.
• 24 February 2011 "No ROTC" coaltion "Our Statement".  A group opposes ROTC at Columbia, listing the transgender issue, violence against women in the military, ROTC being part of the military, the credit issue and the income issue.
• 25 February 2011 DNAinfo article "Mayor Bloomberg Urges Columbia to Bring Back ROTC".  Note:  On a radio talk show, Bloomberg said "I think Columbia should — my personal opinion, I can't tell Columbia what to do  — but they should open an ROTC program and give the kids the alternative".
• 25 February 2011 Military.com article "Heckled Vet Bucks Columbia Critics".  Note:  The veteran makes it clear that the heckling was not directed at him being a veteran or even being in support of ROTC, but instead "was spurred by his saying that America has enemies in the world that "want to kill you.""
• 28 February 2011 Columbia spectator article "Student groups avoid official stance on ROTC".  Note: The CU Dems and the Columbia Queer Alliance, among otherts, have decided to remain neutral on ROTC due to differing opinions among members.
• 28 February 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Faculty statement falls short: The professors who oppose ROTC are neglecting a number of key issues" by Learned Foote '11and Sean Wilkes '06. Note:  Two leaders of pro-ROTC student efforts find many problems in the anti-ROTC faculty statement.
• 1 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Why I signed: We need to get back in touch with our military, right here on campus" by Mark Lilla.  Note:  A humanities professor describes his college experience where the "students I knew were upper-middle class kids who had never met a soldier, yet had baroque theories about the military-industrial complex, and totally unrealistic views about war. I had no respect for them" and rejects the notion that the world would be better off if Columbia students were kept as separate as possible from the military.  "In democracies you do not control the military by holding soldiers at arm’s length. You do it by holding them close."
• 1 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Better off without: Bringing ROTC back would intensify class differences, not reduce them" by Tyler Williams. Note: A PhD student in literature argues that a person from a low income background going to Columbia and then serving in the military inhibits social mobility.
• 2 March 2011 DNAinfo article "ROTC Has No Plans For Columbia Return Even If Invited Back".  Note:  A New York City local news site interviewed an Army ROTC official who was skeptical of his branch offering Columbia an ROTC program.  This issue is discussed in more detail in the Issues Page "If top colleges ask for ROTC programs, will any be offered?"
• 2 March 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "ROTC: Undecided: Or, what I wish I had said at the town hall" by Aki Terasaki.  Note:  An undergraduate expresses frustration with the adversarial process used to discuss the ROTC issue and call for a more centrist, fact-based approach to be taken by the Task Force in synthesizing the information about ROTC.
• 3 March 2011 Columbia University Task Force on Military Engagement E-Mails to 3/2.
• 3 March 2011 Columbia Spectator Spectrums blog item "Task Force releases report on ROTC findings".  Note:  Students voted 60% in favor of "a return of ROTC to Columbia’s campuses". 
• 4 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Task force releases ROTC survey on student opinions; faculty speaks out via opposing petitions".  Note:  "The task force will present a full summary of its findings at the University Senate’s full body meeting this afternoon at 1:15 p.m.  The University Senate is expected to vote on ROTC at either its April 1 or April 29 full-body meetings."
• 4 March 2011 Contentions (Commentary) blog item "ROTC Returns to Harvard but Remains AWOL from Some Ivy League Campuses" by Max Boot.  Note:  "Now it is high time for other elite institutions that have been dragging their feet — that means you, Columbia; you too, Stanford — to invite ROTC back on campus. And it is equally important for the armed forces to accept the invitation."
• 4 March 2011 Columbia University "Report of the Task Force on Military Engagement".
• 4 March 2011 Columbia Spectator Spectrums blog item "Liveblog: University Senate discusses ROTC".  Note:  "Professor Helene Aguilar, addressing concerns about how exactly an ROTC program would be implemented, says that she is “concerned that you may find it more difficult than one would think to establish these terms and limitations.”  For instance, she said, recent reports have indicated that ROTC cadets are not allowed to refer to info released by WikiLeaks, which is still considered classified. “That struck me as problematic, as the institution we are,” Aguilar says."  A comment posted on the blog post minutes later quoted perspective on the WikiLeaks issue from the Advocates for ROTC "Issues" pages : "ROTC students are not prohibited from reading accounts of WikiLeaks information, and are not even prohibited from accessing the WikiLeaks web site, but they are discouraged from accessing the WikiLeaks site since it might make it more difficult to get security clearance."
• 4 March 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "USenate Discusses ROTC Report".  Note:  President Lee Bollinger "expressed the need for an open, fact-based discussion and called the Senate “the right body to institute that discussion.”" He "said that he thinks the conditions will be favorable to “at least one branch of the ROTC,” (almost certainly Naval ROTC, the program Columbia participated in prior to 1969) but quickly qualified that statement, stating it was “just a preliminary” opinion."  There was also some discussion of the WikiLeaks and faculty appointment issues.
• 5 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "More details from ROTC survey indicate division between schools".  Note:  "[General Studies] and [School of International and Political Affairs] students overwhelmingly favored ROTC’s return, by 71-23 and 66-28 margins, respectively. [School of Engineering and Applied Science] students approved of ROTC by a 70-23 margin. A majority of [Columbia College] students supported ROTC as well, although the margin in CC was narrower, with 59 percent supporting ROTC and 35 percent opposing it. Barnard was the only school to oppose ROTC. Forty-seven percent of Barnard students said they would disapprove of ROTC’s return, while 42 percent said they would approve of it."  As the Columbia University Senate began to debate ROTC, "Task force co-chair Roosevelt Montas, CC '95, MA '96, PhD '04, and Associate Dean for the Core Curriculum, told concerned senators that Columbia would control the structure of the program, a statement echoed in the task force’s report. “Academic appointment and course credit must remain under complete control of the faculty of Columbia, and never under ROTC or the military,” Montas said. “So every subsequent discussion of the issue has had that as an assumption, as a premise.”  The senate meets April 1 and April 29, and will almost certainly vote on an ROTC resolution at one of these meetings."
• 6 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "On ROTC: By allowing ROTC, Columbia can provide the military with the young minds it needs" by Jagdish Bhagwati.  Note:  A professor of economics and law relates how his daughter has worked on women's issues in the military and says that none of her accomplishments in this area would have happened "if she had not joined the Marines in the first place ... The strongest argument for ROTC, now that DADT has been defeated and will go within a year for sure, is that ROTC is one more, and indeed an important, way people like Anu are brought into the military... I should add that familiarity breeds contempt, but contempt does not breed familiarity."
• 7 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Schools show varied support for ROTC return".  Note:  "Barnard senator Sara Snedeker, BC ’12, said it is “extremely important” that Barnard was the only school to have a plurality disapprove of an ROTC return to Columbia. But she also noted that only 17 percent of Barnard students took part in the survey."
• 7 March 2011 Wall Street Journal video "ROTC Back at Harvard".  Note:  Anne Neal, head of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni discusses whether trustees or faculty should decide on allowing ROTC.  She said "It's time for the trustees to say, yes, we will formally recognize ROTC, and then to call on the faculty to undertake the effort it needs to figure out how to have courses that can receive credit for ROTC on campus".
• 8 March 2011 Saltzman Institute of war and Peace Studies and School of International and Public Affairs (Columbia) video "Perspectives on ROTC at Columbia".
• 9 March 2011 Columbia spectator article "At meeting, Barnard faculty votes against ROTC's return".  Note:  The vote took place on 7 March at a Barnard faculty meeting.  Barnard's Provost Elizabeth Boylan wrote that “It should be noted that this vote took place without knowledge of the exact wording of a motion that the Senate will consider”.  The article did not give the vote totals, but English professor Peter Platt, one of Barnard’s two faculty senators said “there’s not unanimity by any means”.
• 9 March 2011 Christian Science Monitor op-ed "With DADT out of the way, Harvard and military make a great couple" by Dan Caldwell.  Note:  A professor of political science at Pepperdine University and former Naval officer outlines 8 reasons why ROTC should return to elite university campuses.  One is "I found that officers educated at universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford often had markedly different attitudes than their peers from the military academies or state universities with large ROTC programs. I believe that the presence of such officers in the military is highly desirable; they are representative of an important segment of American society that is currently under-represented in the military. They are more likely to question unreasonable or illegal orders or policies than those educated in a more militarily, hierarchically oriented environment."  Another is "I served on a university committee at Stanford University that negotiated with the Department of Defense (DOD) concerning academic credit for ROTC courses. In these negotiations, the Department of Defense indicated its willingness to grant ROTC credit for courses taught by Stanford professors. For example, a course on war and conflict taught by the respected Professor Peter Paret, a translator of Clausewitz’s “On War,” would have been granted credit for the required ROTC course on military history. If DOD were now willing to accept such courses, the objection to having non-Stanford professors teaching courses for academic credit would be lessened."
• 9 March 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Faculty Perspectives on ROTC: “The Senate Isn’t the Sovereign Body of the University”".  Note:  Reporting on a faculty panel on the ROTC issue, BWOG noted that Prof. Allan Silver "stated the obvious but critically overlooked fact the contracts are signed by students as consenting adults, and the University should respect their right to exercise that agency."  Prof. Bruce Robbins, who said “I have better things to do” than participate in the forum, said that the US military's practices are immoral and illegal.  There was "surprising agreement between the four panelists on the following: If the ROTC were to return to campus it would only be as an extra curricular activity. Conditions would include that military instructors not be appointed as full professors and that courses would not count for academic credit, as is currently the case at MIT and Princeton. Silver called the idea of the military owning a piece of the university “abhorrent.” The faculty firmly believe they should have the final say. “The senate isn’t the sovereign body of the university, the faculty is the sovereign body of the university,” concluded Silver, siding with Helfand. He objects to phraseology of ROTC “returning”; if the program comes back it will be “on our terms, not their terms.”"
• 9 March 2011 Huffington Post column "Return of ROTC to Columbia University? An Issue Much Larger Than 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'" by Katherine Franke. Note: The director of Columbia's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law makes the incompatible values argument about the university and the military.
• 10 March 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed "Columbia University's ROTC Shame" by Jacques Barzun.  Note:  A former provost and professor of history at Columbia University calls on Columbia to live by the virtues of the Citizen soldier about which they learn in Columbia's renowned Core Curriculum, and restore ROTC.  He criticizes a statement from anti-ROTC faculty, which warns of "militirization" of the campus, and notes that they "ignore the Eisenhower Leadership Development Program, a joint endeavor with West Point that sends dozens of commissioned and uniformed officers each year to Columbia's sacrosanct campus."  See letters on 16 March.
• 13 March 2011 Columbia Spectator letter "In ROTC debate, army deserves fair treatment" by Doug Kechijian.  Note:  "As unconventional warfare becomes more common, even the military’s staunchest critics should want liberally-educated, culturally-sensitive officers among those advising elected officials about security policy and, just as importantly, performing ground-level diplomacy like meeting with tribal elders in Afghanistan to implement counterinsurgency measures."
• 20 March 2011 Columbia spectator op-ed "Enhancing Columbia’s role in the military: The military would benefit from Columbia graduates and Columbia should respond to the call" by LTC Eliot Goldman.  Note:  Columbia College’s highest-ranking active service member writes "The opportunities for the finest education in our land need to be available to future service members. The ability of future leaders to see people on a daily basis in uniform as people, and not as a sub-species, should be part of a Columbia education."
• 21 March 2011 Socialist Worker article "No ROTC at Columbia".  Note:  The article claims "the administration has on numerous occasions attempted to bring ROTC back. In 2001, 2005 and 2008, the issue of welcoming ROTC back to campus was raised, and each time, the University Senate voted down the program's reinstitution on campus".  Actually, none of the movements was led by the administration, and the 2005 effort was vehemently opposed by the administration, with the provost comparing those supporting ROTC to racists.  "In response to the university's attempt to bring back ROTC on campus, a group of students have formed the "No ROTC" coalition that is organizing to ensure that ROTC remains off campus. The coalition, which consists of campus groups including Students for Justice in Palestine, LUCHA and the International Socialist Organization, as well as individual students, opposes ROTC for several reasons."  The reason for "Students for Justice in Palestine" was not explained. The article also claimed that the administration framing the ROTC issue in terms of DADT now was "dishonest", even though the university and ROTC opponents had taken that view for the past decade.
• 21 March 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Draft Senate Resolution to Propose Military Engagement Released".  Note: The draft includes: "BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED That Columbia University welcomes the opportunity to explore further mutually beneficial relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps".
• 22 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "USenators review drafts of ROTC resolution: The draft of the resolution sent to Spectator did not include references to Columbia's nondiscrimination policy".  Note:  "While the resolution draft expresses support for a return of ROTC to Columbia, it is not tantamount to senate support for ROTC. The full University Senate will likely vote on whether to approve the resolution in April."  One Senator said that most opposition to ROTC "has been based on concerns about Columbia becoming militarized or losing its academic autonomy", an issue discussed on the Cultures issues page.
• 22 March 2011 Morningside Post (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs) blog post "Why ROTC Should Not Return to Campus" by Aarti Sethi.  Note:  An anthropology student makes the argument that the university and the military are incompatible in their values, and concludes that "The university is a precious space whose imperfect autonomy must be protected". He argues that "a hallmark of democracies is civilian control over the armed forces" and therefore the leaders of both should be educated separately.
• 22 March 2011 Morningside Post (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs) blog post "Why ROTC Should be Reinstated at Columbia" by Columbia SIPA Vets’ Association.  Note:  "Why not allow Columbia students to take part in ROTC on their own campus, while at the same time pushing for informed discussion about the larger issues that have been raised by this debate?"
• 23 March 2011 "No ROTC" blog item "Response to the Columbia Senate Resolution Calling for Return of ROTC".  Note:  The Coalition Opposed to ROTC writes that "it is disturbing that the resolution ignores the outcomes of the discussions on campus in 2008, when strong opposition to ROTC was recorded across campus, partly, but certainly not exclusively due to DADT".  In 2008 the aggregate vote was narrowly against ROTC, with DADT widely cited as the dominant reason for opposing ROTC.  The Coalition writes "Not once was the military publicly consulted to see whether they would even want to return to Columbia", but doesn't claim that there was no private consultation.
• 27 March 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "How to be an activist: Student groups should promote open discussion over narrow monologues".  Note: The editorial promotes an atmosphere for discussing issues such as ROTC in which one can "strongly support a cause or an idea, while still being open to hearing the other side and challenging one’s opinions", an approach taken at the Advocates for ROTC Issues pages and enunciated by Columbia President Lee Bollinger.
• 29 March 2011 Student Free Press article "Columbia hasn’t approached Army about ROTC".  Note:  In advance of the University Senate vote on ROTC, "The Army says it would be interested in exploring ROTC’s return to Columbia University, but has not been approached by the school".  No information is presented about Columbia-Navy contacts.
• 30 March 2011 Columbia Spectator article "ROTC opponents still angered by poll, perceived lack of safe space".  Note:  "The Muslim Students Association and the Coalition for a Military Free Campus hosted a town hall Tuesday night to discuss the ROTC’s potential return to Columbia... although members of the coalition stated that they had heavily advertised the event, attendees were mostly coalition members, along with a handful of other students".  Members of the groups criticized the process of the ROTC Task Force. “Discussion was not fostered and people summarized opinion,” Jessie Stoolman, BC ’14, said. “We could ask [the] task force questions, but they didn’t have to answer us. You could email questions, but I am not aware of anyone getting a response.” "Coalition members said that they have had to work hard to inform students about ROTC—by setting up tables on College Walk, for example—in the absence of other sources of information."
• 31 March 2011 Columbia University Senate draft "Resolution on Columbia University’s Relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States of America".  Note:  The key wording is "Be it further resolved that Columbia University welcomes the opportunity to explore further mutually beneficial relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps".  Note that the final version passed on 1 April differed from this draft.
• 1 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Final ROTC resolution released, mentions nondiscrimination".  Note:  Some Senators seek to delay a vote on the draft resolution to 29 April.  Eszter Polonyi, a student senator for the Graduate School of Arts and Science, said that there has not been enough debate to proceed to a vote, in part because “the majority of students and faculty are equally clueless on what is going on”.  Prof. Jim Applegate said "We have bent over backwards to try to get people involved in this … I firmly believe that the senate has discharged its responsibility to due diligence".  The Student Affairs Committee voted 17-5 in favor of sending the resolution to the full Senate, and the senate’s Faculty Affairs Committee also voted to do so.
• 1 April 2011 Council of Foreign Relations podcast "ROTC Returns to the Ivy League".  Note: Roosevelt Montas, professor and associate dean at Columbia, who co-chaired the school's Task Force on Military Engagement, and Donald Downs, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin discuss issues such as the civil-military gap and the gap between students and Vietnam-era faculty.
• 1 April 2011 Columbia Spectator blog item "ROTC Resolution passes".  Note:  The vote was 51-17 in favor of the opening to ROTC.  There were "Impassioned remarks from Executive Committee chair Sharyn O’Halloran" and about 20 people outside were "banging drums and chanting".
• 1 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "USenate Approves ROTC Resolution".  Note:  The vote count was initially listed incorrectly and then corrected.
• 1 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "USenate votes to pass ROTC resolution".  Note: By a 51-17 vote, "The University Senate has taken a major step towards inviting the ROTC back to Columbia, voting to support the return of the military training program that has been absent from campus for more than 40 years...  The resolution’s passage does not guarantee that ROTC will return to Columbia. A branch of the military would need to agree to start a program here, and then [Columbia University President Lee] Bollinger and other administrators would need to negotiate the terms of the program with that branch. Bollinger said he think that “one branch does want to” start a program at Columbia... “This is a powerful, powerful vote here, in my mind,” Bollinger said."
• 1 April 2011 Columbia University Senate meeting minutes (approved at the next meeting on 29 April).
• 1 April 2011 Columbia University Senate "Resolution on Columbia University’s Relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States of America".  Note:  This is the version that passed, with the key wording "Be it Resolved That Columbia University welcomes the opportunity to explore mutually beneficial relationships with the Armed Forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps." Three "resolved" paragraphs from the draft version were removed.
• 1 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Report From the USenate Meeting".  Note:  The atmosphere of the meeting and speakers is described.  "It went con-pro, and Bwog was reminded of Julius Caesar."
• 2 April 2011 New York Times article "Decades After Ban, Columbia Opens Door to R.O.T.C. Return". Note:  "More than four decades after Columbia University, the heart of the Vietnam-era student movement, banned R.O.T.C. from campus in a moment of 1960s antimilitary rage, the University Senate voted overwhelmingly on Friday to support efforts to bring the group back... the sense of generational turnabout in the Senate vote was not lost on the students of today".  Although Harvard and other unversities have made moves to welcome ROTC after the repeal of DADT "For reasons both of history and institutional character, however, none has the importance of Columbia, which was home to a particularly vigorous chapter of Students for a Democratic Society — some of whose most militant members helped to form the left-wing radical group the Weathermen."
• 2 April 2011 Cub Pub (Columbia Political Union) blog item "ROTC and the Columbia Legacy".  Note:  "Columbia University has long been associated with its Leftist activism, and its 1969 ban of ROTC has become a symbol of Columbia's positioning on the political spectrum.  However, the University Senate resolution on April 1st to remove the ROTC ban was a significant shift for Columbia."
• 3 April 2011 Fiat Lux (Stanford Review) blog item "Columbia Votes for ROTC Return".  Note:  "The Columbia decision will likely influence Stanford’s faculty senate decision if the faculty senate is at all worried about public opinion. At this point, a no-vote would elicit from much of the public and conservative media a strong negative comparison between Stanford and other schools."
• 4 April 2011 Harvard Crimson article "Columbia Senate Supports ROTC".  Note:  Some expressed concern that Harvard's process for welcoming ROTC was less open than that of Columbia, but Columbia and Harvard graduate Michael Segal pointed to the prospect of an on-campus Naval ROTC unit at Columbia and the history of radicalism at Columbia as factors necessitating a broader process at Columbia.  In addition, as mentioned in the ROTC resolution passed Columbia's University Senate, "the 1976 Tien Special Committee specifically empowers the University Senate to discuss and decide on any future relationships with the Armed Forces".
• 5 April 2011 Columbia spectator letter "Columbia shouldn't allow visible acts of militarism" by Herbert J. Gans.  Note:  An emeritus professor of sociology argues for a ban on military uniforms on campus, "The University should be spared from displays of militarism".
• 7 April 2011 Village Voice article "The Return of ROTC to Columbia".  Note:  Mark Rudd, one of the student leaders of the 1968 revolt "wonders if perhaps training future officers at Columbia might not be a bad thing after all. “They’ll have been exposed to both liberals and the liberal arts,” he says. “Perhaps they’ll moderate the right-wing officer caste mentality a bit.”"  The article also noted that paragrpahs in the draft resolution about the university retaining control of course credits and instructor status were omitted from the final version, but the stated reason for that change was that such control became standing policy of the university as of the point when the Mansfield committee recommendations were adopted, and it was considered redundant to re-state them.
• 7 April 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "An open letter to President Bollinger: Columbia should be free from military affiliation" by Rosalind Morris.  Note:  An anthropology professor lists a large set of objections to the military, including women not being allowed in some combat roles.
• 8 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "On ROTC opinions, transgender students vary".  Note:  Commenting on the transgender issue, Rey Grosz, who identifies as transgender, said "People are just hypocritical and just want something to fight for... I don’t think that they have a right to speak on behalf of the discriminated-against trans population that aren’t allowed in the military. Not letting ROTC people in—I think that’s discrimination". Astronomy professor Jim Applegate "emphasized the clause in the policy which says, “Nothing in this policy shall abridge academic freedom or the University’s educational mission”—a mission that includes educating future military service members as well as civilians about military policy". Gavin McGown said "There’s an interesting parallel between people who say they get looks for walking around in fatigues and me getting looks for walking around in a dress".
• 8 April 2011 Eric's Learning Curve blog post "In victory, a warning to Columbia ROTC advocates".  Note:  "As we continue to work joyfully after the senate vote to help establish ROTC on campus, we must also account for the opposition and defend our gains from invigorated anti-military activists."
• 9 April 2011 New York Daily News editorial "Having rescinded its perverse ban on the ROTC, Columbia University must now make the return happen".
• 13 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Bollinger talks global centers with grad students".  Note:  "Bollinger asked the students for suggestions for how the administration can help with their concerns, while noting the delicate balance between which decisions involve the community as a whole and which are resolved at the administrative level. He cited the issue of allowing ROTC to return to campus as an example of when issues should be resolved publicly.“I really pushed that into the community,” Bollinger said."
• 15 April 2011 Columbia Political Review article "As the Crow Flies: Normalizing the Poverty Draft through ROTC" by Jacob Shiflett GS'11. Note: A US Army veteran claims that the ROTC resolution was "rushed through the University Senate by special interest groups" without naming any groups.  He also asserts that there was not sufficient opportunity for discussion, despite the fact that others at Harvard and Stanford have pointed to the discussion at Columbia and asked why they haven't had such a robust discussion.  Shiflett goes on to complain that alumni did not have enough voice in the ROTC debate.  Shiflett claims the military uses the GI bill to "solicit the underprivileged for military service", but fails to note that the underprivileged are underrepresented in the military.  Furthermore, one of the comments on the article suggests that Shiflett attended Columbia on the GI bill. 
• 17 May 2011 Barnard College "Alumnae in the Military: Katherine Diefenbach '04".  Note:  Diefenbach joined Army ROTC after 9/11 and has served in both Iraq and the White House.
• 17 May 2011 Barnard College "Alumnae in the Military: Natalie Lopez-Barnard '10".  Note:  Lopez-Barnard did Army ROTC and said " I was drawn to sports psychology and helping people in stressful positions, which eventually led me to think about using my education in psychology to help enhance combat performance".
• 19 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "At field training, ROTC cadets prepare for battle".  Note:  "Choosing ROTC means balancing civilian life with the duties of an officer-in-training. It’s not always easy.“It’s definitely tough,” Brown, a bio-medical engineering major, said. “I just kind of make it happen. You’ve got to use time more efficiently.”"  See also photos, reporters discussing their experiences on 21 April and letter on 27 April.
• 21 April 2011 Spectrum (Columbia Spectator) blog item "Reporters reflect on their field trip with Columbia ROTC cadets".  Note:  The students discuss their experience of being embedded with ROTC students to prepare the 19 April Spectator article.  "On the bus, I was surprised to hear conversations about topics ranging from literature to psychology. Suddenly, it dawned on me: even though these people appear to be soldiers based on their attire and demeanor, they are still students, just like me."
• 22 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Columbia Officially Recognizes Naval ROTC".  Note:  "Columbia’s Navy and Marine Corps-option midshipmen will participate in Naval ROTC through the NROTC unit hosted at the SUNY Maritime College in Throgs Neck, Queens... The new agreement between the Navy and Columbia will provide that NROTC active duty Navy and Marine Corps officers will be able to meet with Columbia NROTC midshipmen on the Columbia campus in spaces furnished by Columbia."
• 22 April 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Following USenate vote, Columbia officially recognizes Navy ROTC program".  Note: "Navy spokesperson Tamara Lawrence said that it is not unusual for a school to participate in NROTC through a nearby school with an already-established program. But the agreement will give NROTC a “very visible” presence at Columbia, she added." A Columbia committee "will likely review what sort of academic credit to give to outside NROTC classes and also what on-campus space cadets should be able to use. Lawrence added that active-duty Navy and Marine Corps officers will be able to meet with NROTC cadets on Columbia space in Morningside Heights to receive “mentorship and guidance.”... Columbia had been in discussions with the Navy about ROTC for “over a year.” Bollinger explained that he was initially approached about an NROTC return by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, but emphasized that an agreement was always contingent on the senate review process."  On the transgender issue President Bolliunger said “It’s just something that at this stage, all things considered—because the university community was fully aware of this, the Council of Deans was fully aware of this—that itself will not preclude having a relationship [with the military]... Nevertheless, like with other issues, we want to keep working on it.”
• 22 April 2011 On Campus (Columbia University) article "Columbia to Officially Recognize Naval ROTC".  Note:  "“The University Senate provided an open and transparent process for multiple voices in the Columbia community to be heard on the issue of reinstating ROTC,” said Sharyn O’Halloran, chair of the University Senate and professor of political economy. “The overwhelming final vote reflected a strong consensus that the time has come for Columbia to reestablish relations with the ROTC in ways that both maintain our academic values and allow the University to play a productive role in educating the nation’s next generation of military leaders.”"
• 25 April 2011 Wall Street Journal article "Columbia Allows ROTC to March Back".  Note:  "Jose Robledo, a Columbia senior and ROTC member who served in the Army for nine years before enrolling... said he heard from two students who were considering attending Columbia in the fall but wanted to be able to participate in ROTC. Both of them decided to enroll, in part because of the rapprochement between the school and the military, he said." Cheryl Miller of the American Enterprise Institute, who plans to release a report this week calling on the military to spend more time and effort setting up ROTC programs in cities like New York and at more elite schools said "You have these kids in New York and cultural competency is a way of life for them."
• 27 April 2011 Columbia Spectator letter "An open letter to President Bollinger: ROTC violates Columbia's antidiscrimination policy."  Note:  28 members of the department of Anthropology write about the 19 April article on ROTC training, arguing that maneuvers that simulate a battle situation involving "Islamic fundamentalists from the Caucasus" are "discriminatory stereotyping" and therefore violate Columbia's antidiscrimination policy. One comment on the letter, apparently from a recent veteran, adds "Have you ever spoken to an ROTC cadet, a veteran, or soldier? Have you ever observed military training?... The role play scenarios are designed by people who have personally been to the places they attempt to depict and experienced the scenarios they describe. I suggest you do the same. As usual it is YOU who is propagating a discriminatory stereotype. I suggest you get real."
• 29 April 2011 Spectrums (Columbia Spectator) blog item "Anti-ROTC group protesting right now".  Note:  Video and audio of the protest outside the first University Senate meeting following the 1 April ROTC vote.
• 29 April 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Rage Against the ROTC".  Note:  About 20 people gathered outside the Law School to protest what they call the “farcical display of democracy by the Senate Task Force on Military Engagement.”
• 1 May 2011 Columbia Spectator op-ed "Farewell to unhindered thought: ROTC polarizes the campus, a serious threat to maintaining candor" by Helene Barthelemy.  Note:  A sophomore majoring in philosophy writes than in order to have "universities as universal havens of free speech, where all nationalities, specialties, social classes, and political ideologies were represented" universities must keep ROTC from being represented.
• 4 May 2011 American Enterprise Institute report "Underserved: A Case Study of ROTC in New York City" by Cheryl Miller.  Note: Miller, who manages the Program on American Citizenship at AEI provides the definitive report documenting the shortage of opportunities for ROTC in New York City and how this has negative impacts on the military and on the city.
• 11 May 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Year in Review: After 43-year absence, Columbia recognizes ROTC".  Note:  The article says "Columbia will give NROTC midshipmen academic credit for their work" but it is not clear that will be the case for all or even some courses.
• 25 May 2011 Associated Press article "Navy, Columbia to sign pact in shipboard ceremony lifting university’s 42-year-old ROTC ban".  Note:  "Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and university president Lee C. Bollinger will sign the agreement aboard the USS Iwo Jima as part of New York’s annual Fleet Week on Thursday... Under the agreement, the Navy will have an office in the university’s campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Recruits will train at the State University of New York’s Maritime College in the Bronx". 
• 26 May 2011 Columbia University On Campus article "Navy and Columbia Sign NROTC Agreement".  Note:  "University Provost Claude M. Steele will establish a committee of faculty, students and administrators to oversee implementation of the ROTC program consistent with Columbia’s academic standards and policies of nondiscrimination.".  The article includes video of the signing of the agreement.
• 26 May 2011 NY1 story "Columbia University Signs ROTC Agreement".  Note: “The Columbia campus was a front in the culture wars, if you will,” said Dan McSweeney, a Columbia alumnus who serves in the armed forces. “And for this to be happening means some level of resolution is occurring.”
• 26 May 2011 "Columbia University NROTC Proclamation" by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. Note:  In his remarks on the "re-establishment of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Unit to Columbia University after an absence of 40 years" Secretary Mabus said "Renewal of this formal relationship though will serve to bring a whole lot of new and talented officers into the Navy and Marine Corps every year, and the presence of NROTC will enrich and strengthen both services and the educational experience of all students".
• 26 May 2011 "Ceremonial Remarks at the Signing of Naval ROTC Agreement" by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger.  Note:  President Bollinger notes how Columbia's course on “War Aims” during World War I developed into the Core Curriculum and said "Columbia will be an even more valuable forum for enhancing the relationship between our military and civil society in the years ahead".
• 27 May 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Bollinger signs NROTC agreement with Navy Secretary".  Note:  President Bollinger said "This offers a new era of a great relationship between universities like ours and armed forces... We are rebuilding that relationship."  Secretary Mabus said "Having Navy and Marine officers on campus will give Columbia University students a chance to interact with the military in a way they hadn’t before... And this will give ROTC members a much greater opportunity in terms of what they can learn." The statement in the article that "cadets will earn Columbia credit for their work" is likely to refer to the possibility of credit for particular courses if authorized by Columbia's Committee on Instruction. 
• 8 June 2011 New York Post op-ed "ROTC's NYC boycott" by Cheryl Miller.  Note:  Miller says that requiring Columbia ROTC students to commute one hour back and forth to the Bronx for Naval ROTC will reduce participation, and calls on the military to invest more in Manhattan.  "Fordham University's Army ROTC program almost closed in 2000. Then it got an energetic new instructor -- a native New Yorker and Fordham ROTC graduate -- who opened classes at the school's Lincoln Center campus and began recruiting aggressively at outside campuses. Fordham Army ROTC went from the bottom of the pack to the top 15 percent of ROTC units nationwide."
• 20 June 2011 Eric's Learning curve blog post "Suggestions for Columbia ROTC".  Note:  Suggestions for the designers and builders of Columbia ROTC.
• 30 June 2011 New York Post article "Chuck in plea over ROTC".  Note:  "Sen. Charles Schumer yesterday urged the Navy to provide on-campus military training to help relaunch its ROTC program at Columbia University to save students in the program from having to travel to The Bronx for drills.... Schumer said students who want to enroll in ROTC have to travel to SUNY Maritime in The Bronx to fulfill their military-training requirements, a two-hour trek that will discourage some from enrolling."
• 3 August 2011 USA Today article "ROTCs return to Ivy League".  Note:  "In 2010, only 54 students from the Ivy League schools were commissioned through ROTC programs, about 1% of the total students commissioned that year, according to the Pentagon. That was down from 123 in 1993, or about 2%... The number of Navy ROTC midshipmen enrolled in Ivy League schools was 62 last fall, down from 130 in 2005, according to the Navy."  Describing the atmosphere before the thaw this year between elite colleges and ROTC, Paul Mawn, Chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, said "These cadets and midshipmen have been treated by Harvard as if they were members of a banned fraternity".  Referring to attempts to evoke against ROTC the arguments of the Vietnam war protest movement, Peter Awn, dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia, said "The argument had almost no traction... "I think they were stunned by that."
• 2011 The Forum article "The Pendulum Swings: The Fall and Return of ROTC to Elite Campuses, and Why It Matters" by Prof. Donald Downs.  Note:  Downs, who was present for many of the ROTC events at Columbia and interviewed many of the key figures, notes that "In a very real respect, the politics of ROTC at Columbia represented a dialectical struggle to reintroduce and re-legitimate a military perspective in the broad marketplace of campus ideas" and that ROTC "reflected a stretching of the university mind to embrace a set of perspectives and values that lie outside the horizons of most campus citizens these days, such as military conceptions of duty, patriotism, and the use of force in justifiable circumstances".  He describes the parallels between the efforts for acceptance of gays and acceptance of ROTC, and how these came together at Columbia.  Downs also relates that in January 2011, high-level ROTC officials began making contact with Columbia president Lee Bollinger.
• 6 September 2011 BWOG (Columbia) blog item "Everything You Need to Know About ROTC At Columbia".  Note:  BWOG brings new students up to date on the ROTC issue, illustrating the broad themes but leaving the impression that DADT was a policy of the military instead of the law and that the 2008 vote at Columbia was marred by significant fraud.
• Fall 2011 Columbia College Today letters "Return of ROTC".  Note:  Two alumni protest the return of ROTC and one celebrates it.
• 30 September 2011 Columbia Spectator article "Vet population likely to decrease due to new GI Bill cuts". Note:  In discussing an expected fall in veterans at Columbia due to a new law capping GI Bill veterans' benefits, "University Senator Jose Robledo, GS and a veteran, added that during the ROTC debates last school year, there were “high-minded academics and left-wing radicals” who pushed forth their concerns with ROTC, but that veterans at Columbia helped moderate the conversation."
• 25 October 2011 Columbia Spectator article "As provost finalizes NROTC committee, student senators call for transparency".  Note:  "A University statement announcing the agreement with the Navy in April said that students, faculty, and administrators would serve on the committee. But according to someone involved in the ROTC discussions—who asked not to be named because discussions about the committee have not been public—there were no plans to put a student on the committee as recently as a few days ago, and a student member was added only after students put pressure on the provost’s office."
• 9 November 2011 Columbia spectator article "Occupy movements renew interest in activism".  Note:  "Yoni Golijov, CC ’12 and member of the Barnard/Columbia International Socialist Organization, outlined some of the factors influencing the 1968 protesters: “They had a racist expansion, the gym being built in Morningside Heights with a back entrance for community members … they had the war in Vietnam, and they had ROTC on campus.” ... “So now we have three wars, at least, we have another racist expansion, and we have ROTC back on campus, and … we want to have a voice. There are student groups popping up just everywhere … radicals, liberals, progressives, conservatives, whatever.”"
• 10 November 2011 Columbia Spectator editorial "A farewell to arms: As the Iraq War comes to an end, let us welcome our veterans home".  Note:  Noting the troops coming home from Iraq, and noting Columbia's engagement with ROTC, and how Columbia recruits undergraduates throughout the country, Spectator suggests "why not begin deploying those same admissions officers to military posts, with a mission to inform transitioning service-members about the opportunities Columbia offers".
• 14 November 2011 New York Times article "Recruiting Veterans, Columbia Finds an Impressive Applicant Pool".  Note:  Columbia not only has the highest number of veterans as undergraduates at elite colleges, but has been recruiting at military bases to find the best candidates.  "In a day sitting in on interviews with the 10 applicants — all in their mid-20s — a pattern emerges: generally speaking, they once were lost, but now are found."
• 5 December 2011 Columbia Spectator article "After transparency concerns, NROTC committee names released".  Note:  Columbia's ROTC committee will include two students.  Neither is an ROTC student and neither is at the engineering school, expected to be the part of the university with highest Naval ROTC participation.  Interim Provost John Coatsworth said purpose of the committee is to ensure that the ROTC program meets Columbia’s academic standards.  University Senator, ROTC cadet, and army veteran Jose Robledo endorsed an ROTC+ vision, saying he hopes the committee will help design a program that exceeds Columbia’s academic standards and challenges students.
• 7 December 2011 Columbia Spectator article "After 43 years, Navy meets with students about CU ROTC".  Note: Only a handful of students stopped by the information session, which was publicized in an email to sutdents from the provost, but the session was in the last week of classes before final exams.
• 9 December 2011 Eric's Learning curve blog post "Modular concept of Columbia ROTC+".  Note:  "The basic premise of the modular concept is that delegating the required NROTC training to SUNY Maritime allows the ROTC components on the Columbia campus to be customized to Columbia ROTC+."
• Winter 2011-12 Columbia College Today letter "ROTC" by Prof. Allan Silver.  Note:  Responding to a previous letter, Silver notes that universities with ROTC "have full control of faculty appointments and the award of credit for courses... Drill in uniform — certainly with weapons — has long not been held on campuses that do not wish it. Uniforms are not routinely worn. Columbia students in ROTC programs are not under military discipline. They enter the military after graduation, when commissioned as officers. In all relevant respects, they are indistinguishable from fellow students and have all the formal and informal rights enjoyed by other students".

2012:

• 18 January 2012 Wall Street Journal letter "Navy Working to Restore Relations With Elite Colleges" by Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Juan Garcia.  Note:  Garcia, the Pentagon's point man in negotiating the Naval ROTC deals with elite colleges, responds to a 30 December op-ed by writing that those deals "go well beyond the opening of an office. Both Columbia and Harvard agreed to permit access to classrooms, auditoriums, athletic facilities and outdoor fields for ROTC activities. Naval ROTC instructors will conduct office hours for both ROTC midshipmen and non-ROTC students, and the universities will now denote NROTC activities on student transcripts and in the course catalog."  Texts of those agreements have not been released.  Garcia noted that in the past 2 years the Navy opened "host units at Yale University, Arizona State University, the largest undergraduate population in the country, and at Rutgers University, a top-ranked engineering school".  He states that "NROTC is at 15 of the nation's top 25 universities", though that statistic includes colleges such as Harvard in which all classes are taught at cross-town programs. 
• March 2012 book "Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students" by Donald Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili.  Note:  The core of the book is a detailed account of the estrangement of ROTC from elite universities and the reconciliation over the past year.  It focuses on the campus-centered effort at Columbia, where Prof. Downs attended some of the key events, but has detailed discussions of other colleges too.   There is substantial coverage of the issues likely to come up in the current phase of implementation of the return of ROTC, making this one of the key resources in planning the ROTC of the future.
• 31 March 2012 Columbia College Today letter "Return of ROTC" by David N. Stern ’66, ’72 GSAS.  Note:  Responding to a previous letter by Prof. Allan Silver advocating an ROTC program adhering to academic norms, Stern writes "Inviting a“stealth” ROTC back into the Columbia community validates and re-institutionalizes the military-academic complex and sends the wrong message to the wider public as to Columbia’s independence from the warfare state."
• 7 May 2012 New York Times article "After War Room, Heading Ivy League Classroom".  Note:  "In the last year, Harvard, Yale and Columbia have invited R.O.T.C. back to campus after banning the program during Vietnam, citing the end of the military’s ban on openly gay troops as the reason. The hiring of retired military officers as teachers in the Ivy League is part of the same evolution... “There is almost no antimilitary bias among students,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale history professor and the recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for biography, who has welcomed General McChrystal to Yale. “I wouldn’t say it’s true among the faculty.”"  Also, Ivy League colleges "still shy from teaching military history, although that is changing. (The Yale historian Paul Kennedy is developing a course on the military history of the West for undergraduates and Air Force R.O.T.C. students at Yale this fall.)"
• 16 May 2012 This Side of the Pond blog item "The “New” Politics of ROTC?" by Donald Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili.  Note:  The authors of "Arms and the University" discuss recent claims about the history of ROTC, noting "One claim that needs to be addressed first and foremost is the claim that academic standards comprised the main reason for ROTC’s exit from the Ivies and other schools in the late 1960s. We think this claim is historically wrong, and that perpetuating it threatens to distort the present debate." As perspective, they quote then Dean Carl V. Hovde of Columbia University who wrote about the history of ROTC at Columbia that "there is a difference between the reason why a particular issue is raised and the principles in accord with which the issue is resolved".

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