National ROTC Coverage: 2010

• 3 January 2010 Denver Post Op-ed "ROTC program isn't a one-way education" by T.J. Wihera.  Note:  The column outlines the details of ROTC training, including that "ROTC is not an active duty experience", which means that students retain civilian rights not retained during active duty.  Also, enrollement in many ROTC courses "is not limited to ROTC students. Any student can enroll in a military science class and learn along with the cadets".  The column also describes one of the lesser-advertized benefits of ROTC training "tell a hiring manager that you can take directions, develop a plan, and lead others through it, and you can watch them glow."
• 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."
• 3 February 2010 Boston Phoenix article "Howard Zinn: 1922-2010: In Memoriam of the anti-war warrior" by Raymond Mungo.  Note:  Mungo writes that "Howard actually organized a petition on behalf of us student journalists when, in 1966, the BU News student paper that I edited called for a campus ban of ROTC. The idea of kicking ROTC out of BU was utterly outrageous to many, but Howard succeeded in persuading 43 other teachers to join him in signing a faculty petition backing our demand. The Record American (Boston's moronic Hearst tabloid) called for his head, but Howard stood his ground. The anti-ROTC movement soon spread to other campus newspapers, resulting in a ban that still holds at elite Ivy League schools."
• 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.
• 16 February 2010 Harvard Crimson article "Four Harvard Students Receive Gates Scholarships".  Note:  Harvard ROTC graduate Thomas M. Barron ’09, "an Army ROTC cadet at Harvard who is currently training at Fort Benning in Georgia, will put his military service on hold to complete his yearlong degree program at Cambridge.
• 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."
• 19 February 2010 Harvard Crimson column "ROTC? ROFL! Antipathy for the military infiltrates the faculty" by Brian J. Bolduc '10.  Note:  Bolduc suggests that Harvard "seems headed toward recognition" of ROTC if the "Don't ask, don't tell" law is changed, despite some faculty whom Paul E. Mawn ’63, chairman of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, describes as “remnants of what I would call the Woodstock generation. These people supported the Vietcong. They view themselves as veterans of the anti-war movement.”
• 25 February 2010 GW Hatchet article "ROTC students petition for credits".  Note:  Students in Army ROTC at George Washington University are lobbying the University to receive full credit for their ROTC classes, but the University is still determining if the coursework merits an increase from the current partial credit.  Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald Lehman, who was in the Air Force ROTC, said that the courses need to be academically rigorous enough to receive full credit, and time spent in training and drills does not count as academic work.
• 25 February 2010 Secure Nation blog post "A Centrist Approach to Reforming Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" by Michael Segal.  Note:  "Taking the incremental approach to gays in the military may seem like a go-slow approach, but in practice it is likely to be the fastest and most trouble-free way to begin opening up units to gays. In contrast, under the plans of either the left or the right, no units would be opened this year."
• 26 February 2010 Yale Daily News article "ROTC after Yale: A year of midterms".  Note:  In pilot training after Yale, Benji Hulburt ’08 observed “One way Yale might have prepared me better is the study habits... Here I have to study constantly.”  Yale’s ROTC adviser, Jerry Hill said that he was optimistic about reform of the "Don't ask, don't tell" law, and if ROTC returned to Yale, the first initiative Yale must take is to give cadets course credits for their training.
• 1 March 2010 Boston Herald article "Harvard may end 40-year ROTC ban: Don’t-ask-don’t-tell rule a key obstacle".  Note:  Some predicted that ROTC would return to Harvard if Congress repeals DADT, but others said the issue was more complicated, and expected "full official recognition of ROTC", not necessarily splitting of he Harvard students away from the three service ROTC programs at MIT.
• 3 March 2009 Stanford University News article "Faculty Senate to meet on Thursday: The senate will hear reports on ROTC at Stanford...".  Note: The Stanford news office provides some historical background to ROTC at Stanford.
• 4 March 2010 Stanford Review blog item "Preview: Faculty Senate takes on ROTC".  Note:  In advance of a faculty senate meeting discussing ROTC, economics professor John Taylor describes why closer relations between Stanford and the military would be good for both.
• 4 March 2010 Stanford Review blog item "Faculty Senate Launches ROTC Exploration".  Note:  The faculty senate voted overwhelmingly to form an ad-hoc committee to "investigate Stanford’s role in preparing students for leadership in the military including potential relations with ROTC".  Proponents argued that the issues of the 1960s were solvable, and reform of "Don't ask, don't tell" would remove the last major stumbling block to closer relations between Stanfard and the military.
• 5 March 2010 Stanford Daily article "Faculty Senate talks ROTC".  Note:  Professor William Perry ‘49 M.S. ‘50, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, and historian David Kennedy ‘63 argued for restoring ROTC.  "When Perry was discussing the issue with President Hennessy last decade, the controversial policy came up as a roadblock.“We both decided that with ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ it was inappropriate to re-raise the question,” Perry said. But yesterday, Kennedy and Perry expressed confidence in President Obama’s ability to end the policy."
• 5 March 2010 New York Times Bay Area blog item "Stanford Considers Bringing R.O.T.C. Back".  Note:  The history of ROTC leaving Stanford is discussed, complete with a picture of the Navy ROTC building in flames.
• 5 March 2010 The Day (Connecticut) article "Lieberman sees ROTC benefiting from repeal of military ban on gays".  Note:  Senator Lieberman thinks that DADT repeal would make a difference to ROTC acceptance on campus, but thinks full repeal would get less than 60 votes in the Senate.  But Amalia Skilton, coordinator of Yale's LGBT political action group, Fierce Advocates, said "repealing 'don't ask, don't tell' would not cause ROTC to be welcomed back to campus. There would still be opposition."
• 8 March 2010 The Day (Connecticut) editorial "Time coming to reconsider ROTC bans".  Note:  "If Congress lifts the ban tied to sexual orientation, as it should, there will be no excuse for universities to prohibit ROTC programs on their campuses. In fact, a continued ban would itself be a form of discrimination against students who want to pursue military service through ROTC."
• 9 March 2010 San Francisco Chronicle article "Stanford considers bringing ROTC back".  Note:  Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy, in presenting to the Faculty Senate, warned that by banning ROTC at elite colleges "we are in danger of seriously compromising a 200-year-old tradition in this society of the citizen soldier ... In 2008, the 307 general officers in the United States Army ... had 180 of their children in the service" but by contrast, the 535 members of Congress had only 10 children serving in the military.
• 10 March 2010 Stanford Daily article "ROTC Revisited".  Note:  The article recounts the history of ROTC leaving Stanford in the early 1970s, including the arson that burned the ROTC building to the ground in 1968.  David Harris ’67, one of the leaders of the anti-ROTC movement, summed up his position as “If you believe in the life of the mind, you don’t drop napalm on villages”.
• 11 March 2010 FOXNews article "ROTC Enrollment on the Rise Across U.S, Army Reports".  Note:  Enrollment in Army ROTC rose from 28,489 two years ago to 30,721 last year to ~32,000 now.
• 24 March 2010 Harvard Crimson article "Minow Joins Protest of ‘Don’t Ask, Don't Tell’".  Note:  The letter from 6 law school deans "raises the question of whether ROTC will be allowed to return to campus if President Barack Obama’s carries out his promise to repeal the policy ...  According to Paul E. Mawn ’63, chairman of the Advocates for Harvard ROTC, the organization is seeking official recognition for ROTC on campus with or without the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”"  The original version of the article suggested that military recruiters were also banned from Harvard's campus, but that has not been true since court decisions safeguarding the right to recruit.
• 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".
• 26 April 2010 Boston Globe article "Elite colleges thawing on ROTC: Harvard, others reconsider policies".  Note:  The more welcoming climate "has become pronounced since February, when Pentagon leaders for the first time advocated overturning the law that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the ranks."  At Brown, undergraduate dean Katherine Bergeron, "pledged to do more to support students in ROTC, including finding ways to award them academic credit for their military courses".
• 26 April 2010 Brown Daily Herald letter "Bringing back ROTC would improve U. rankings" by David Curry ’51.  Note:  Curry notes that "Simmons is frustrated over Brown’s place in national rankings and feels the rankings do not give Brown credit for the excellence of its standards and programs. Maybe bringing back ROTC ... to Brown would help".  Some college rankings include public service as a criterion.
• 29 April 2010 Brown Daily Herald article "‘Reserve’-ing judgment for ROTC: Forty years after ROTC’s eviction, attitudes soften on campus".  Note:  "Last week, Students For ROTC held its first two public events, a dinner hosting Brown ROTC alums and a panel discussion with military officers... certain factors, including the possible future reformation of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and a shift in attitude, point to the changed nature of a debate over ROTC at Brown".  Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron said “I think it would be fruitful for us to look into ways of recognizing in some fashion the work that students do in the ROTC program (at [Providence College]).”  "The form that such recognition would take hasn’t been decided yet, but more convenient transportation to PC and the possibility for academic credit for ROTC courses are two considerations, according to Bergeron.  Support for students in ROTC isn’t new, she said.  The University has a dean who oversees ROTC cadets and maintains a Web site with the program information.  Top administrators, including President Ruth Simmons, were in attendance at last year’s commissioning ceremony, a visible sign of University support."  However, there is currently only one Brown student doing ROTC, and the student on the Curriculum Committee who wrote the opinion in the late 1960s that called for the complete removal of ROTC, David Kertzer, is now Brown's Provost.
• 29 April 2010 Boston Globe editorial "To restore ROTC, end gay ban".  Note:  Citing both Harvard and Brown, the Globe observes that "Reserve Officers Training Corps units deserve a place at the nation’s elite universities, and Congress can make that happen easily by ending the military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian service members ... If more graduates of top colleges entered the services, the military and the schools alike would benefit". See letters here and here.
• 3 May 2010 The Harbus op-ed "Memorial Day: The Long Crimson Line" by Bobby Wolfe.  Note:  Wolfe, a veteran and Harvard Business School student, looks forward to the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" law and observes "The Harvard students and administration will have a heavy weight lifted from their shoulders, and they should celebrate the diversity that ROTC cadets bring to the community of students".
• 5 May 2010 Stanford Daily article "For Stanford ROTC students, early commutes — and perspective".  Note:  In a panel discussion on whether Stanford should allow ROTC on campus, Kassandra Mangosing ’10 described how she needs to wake up at 3:15 AM to get to ROTC at San Jose State University.
• 20 May 2010 New York Times op-ed "The Academies’ March Toward Mediocrity" by Bruce Fleming.  Note:  Fleming, a professor at the United States Naval Academy, writes that the service academies have "an average cost to taxpayers of nearly half a million dollars per student, more than four times what an R.O.T.C.-trained officer costs" yet " nobody in the Navy or other services who would argue that graduates of Annapolis or West Point are, as a group, better than those who become officers through other programs".  See letters on 24 May.
• 21 May 2010 Boston Globe article "Harvard's ROTC grads to get full treatment in Yard commissioning".  Note:  Speaking at Harvard ROTC Commissioning on 26 May will be Michael G. Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, depicted in the film Charlie Wilson's War, former US Senator Paul Kirk '60 and Harvard President Drew Faust.
• 25 May 2010 The Atlantic column "DADT and Ivy League ROTC" by James Fallows.  Note:  Fallows argues that the "separation between an important military intake system and some of the most elite universities" is "bad for the military, bad for the universities, and bad for the country.  Almost no one urging the anti-ROTC change of those days would have argued or imagined that 35 years after U.S. troops left Vietnam the ban should still be in place."  See responses, but note that the claim that Stanford currently has Army ROTC is not true.
• 26 May 2010 Harvard Crimson op-ed "Lifting the ROTC Ban" by John P. Wheeler MBA ’69. Note:  Wheeler writes that "Our country needs the best that Harvard has to offer in a new century of grave threats" and calls on Harvard to welcome ROTC. 
• 26 May 2010 Harvard Gazette article "From Ivy to military: Harvard’s newest commissioned officers take the stage".  Note:  The article includes background on the speakers at the Harvard ROTC Commissioning ceremony, as well as that of Chuck DePriest '77, who was cited for his role in restoring an ROTC option at Harvard.
• 26 May 2010 Harvard ROTC Commissioning Ceremony 2010.
• 26 May 2010 Remarks of LTC Hall at Harvard ROTC Commissioning
• 26 May 2010 Remarks of Senator Kirk at Harvard ROTC Commissioning.
• 27 May 2010 Harvard Crimson article "At ROTC Ceremony, Faust Calls for Strong Relationship With Military".  Note:  "While not commenting directly on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy—which bans homosexuals from serving openly in the military—Faust seemed to allude to the policy when she asked the recently minted officers to “help reinforce the long tradition of ties between Harvard and military service, as we share hopes that changing circumstances will soon enable us to further strengthen those bonds.”"
• 27 May 2010 The Atlantic column "More on ROTC and the Ivy League" by James Fallows.  Note:  Three veterans discuss the factors other than "Don't ask, don't tell" working against having ROTC at elite colleges.  One noted the high costs at these schools and wrote "I would challenge these elite schools to meet the armed forces half way: if the Defense Department does away with DADT, the elite schools need to provide ample scholarship aid to ROTC scholarship cadets to make it feasible to have ROTC back on these campuses".  Another focused on low enthusiasm from the military, and wrote that "the various ROTCs' evaluative metrics, and perhaps the biases of some ROTC officials, severely undervalue Columbia and similar universities as candidates for new programs."
• 28 May 2010 Harvard Magazine article "“Listen and Learn in Order to Lead”: The ROTC Commissioning Ceremony".  Note:  The article includes an image of the program and complete audio of the ceremony.
• 15 June 2010 Secure Nation blog item "Harvard Gets Its Horn On" by Jules Crittenden. Note: A Boston Herald editor sees "signs of sociological advancement at Harvard Yard" in its relations with ROTC and the military more widely.
• 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.
• 1 July 2010 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony "Capt. Flagg Youngblood Testifies about Kagan's Treatment of Military at Harvard".  Note:  Youngblood, who did ROTC at Yale, recounted how "an English instructor once remarked, Flagg, you shouldn't wear that uniform to class, it's not conducive to learning".  He went on to work on what became the Solomon Amendment, and in his testimony described how Elena Kagan's treatment of military recruiters at Harvard Law School was a clear violation of that law and "Dean Kagan admitted to breaking the law".
• 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."
• 12 July 2010 Minding the Campus article "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others" by Russell K. Nieli.  Note:  "A new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford is a real eye-opener in revealing just what sorts of students highly competitive colleges want -- or don't want -- on their campuses and how they structure their admissions policies to get the kind of "diversity" they seek...  what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards...  Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.""  More relevant to the issue of ROTC at competitive colleges would be data on whether an applicant indicating an interest in doing ROTC at college changes the probability of admission.
• 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 August 2010 Wall Street Journal Op-ed "The Military Should Mirror the Nation: America's Armed Forces are drawn from an increasingly narrow segment of society" by Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller.  Note:  "Much ink has been spilled over the fraught relations between the military and the Ivy League.  But while the good military vs. the bad Ivies makes for good political theater, it isn't the whole story.  While ROTC has been banned from many Ivy League campuses since the Vietnam War, the military also has drawn down its ROTC programs in the Northeast and in urban areas." The authors address questions that people asked about the article here.
• 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.

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