ROTC Coverage Added Recently

• 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.
• 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."
• 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.
• 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."
• 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."
• 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".
• 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.
• 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.

Older material added recently:

• Harvard University: Supreme Sacrifice: Civil War (Union side)
• 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.