University Business - March 2008 - (Page 52) An Army cadet from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln practices tossing dummy grenades during a field exercise. warmongers,” Gauthier says. Laura Miller, a military sociologist for the RAND Corporation, encountered similar views during those years while an assistant professor at UCLA. “There were a lot of lingering stereotypes that ROTC students were robots who would do what they were told. At the very least, there was a wariness towards them,” she recalls. She has made the case for ROTC programs on college campuses, in her classes at UCLA and now through speaking engagements and writings. “With ROTC you’re having the intermingling of future officers with future business leaders and other professionals in society. If you’re kicking ROTC programs off campus, you’re going to have a less diverse group of officers.” ‘Often it’s the benefits that attract you, but after “The charge was, by inviting more ROTC proyou realize the value of service, your sense of grams on campus, you were militarizing colleges,” doing something bigger than yourself kicks in.’ says McClellan. “But why wouldn’t you have the ef—Lt. Col. Elizabeth Cisney, University of Nebraska-Lincoln ROTC fect of liberalizing the military? That’s why we’re at [about] 270 schools and not just at a military academy on the banks of the Hudson River.” That’s not to say opposition to ROTC on campus has disap- that’s the most important kind of support,” Aoun insists. Purdue’s Robinson says that host ROTC schools get a good repeared. During the mid-1990s that opposition extended to the turn on their investment and notes that his school receives more newly established “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays in the military. A new round of protest erupted in 1998 when Con- than $5.8 million a year in Army, Navy, and Air Force scholarships. gress passed the Solomon Act—requiring any educational institu- “There’s a lot of money in the pipeline to bring first-rate students tion receiving federal funds to allow military recruiters on campus. here,” he reasons. Col. Mike Silver adds that his Air Force cadets maintain higher In response, a number of law schools sued the government on the academic averages than the general student body, regularly pergrounds that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a discriminatory practice at form community service, and live by stricter standards of conduct. odds with their own nondiscrimination policies concerning gays. Northeastern president Joseph Aoun agrees with the Solomon “There are more rules,” he explains, adding that, for example, “If law. “In higher education we receive a lot of funds from the U.S. you drink underage, we’ll kick you out.” Army spokesman Kotakis sees another positive dimension. “We Department of Defense. In many ways we have to be absolutely offer arguably the best leadership course in America. We’ve been in consistent with ourselves,” he contends. “We can’t say, ‘Let’s take business since 1916 and have commissioned more than 500,000 the money for research and not welcome ROTC on campus.’ ” A number of schools large enough to serve as host institutions— officers.” At WPI, Gauthier adds that he has taken that idea farther including Harvard, Columbia, and Boston College—have not al- afield. “Even the business classes here are teaching leadership,” he lowed ROTC to return to campus since their faculty groups expelled says. “And we’re getting involved.” the organization during the Vietnam War (although their students can attend ROTC classes elsewhere). An attempt to reinstate ROTC Ron Schachter is a Boston-based freelance writer. 52 | March 2008 universitybusiness.com at Columbia was voted down in 2005 by the university senate. In recent years, students from Boston College to Marquette University in Milwaukee to the University of California, Berkeley, have mounted protests against the ROTC programs on their campuses. The decline in host institutions from more than 400 over the past decades, though, has occurred mainly because of military cutbacks. “From the Army perspective, we had to take a hard look,” explains Army ROTC spokesman Paul Kotakis. “We have finite resources, including the staff that we can assign.” As ROTC programs have shifted from northern urban areas to the South and Midwest, ROTC schools have dwindled to two in New York, one each in Miami and Chicago, and none in Detroit. For those schools that still serve as ROTC hosts, the level of institutional support runs the gamut from providing classrooms, office space, and gym facilities to granting varying amounts of academic credit. While some do not include ROTC course credits on their transcript, Northeastern has just increased allowable ROTC credit hours to 12, which lightens the burden on cadets who must take 28 military credit hours during their college career in addition to their normal course loads to receive their commissions. At many schools, the commanding officers of ROTC programs enjoy the status of department heads and attend meetings with university officials. Northeastern’s Aoun points to less tangible ways that he and other school presidents have underwritten ROTC programs, from attending ROTC ceremonies to including cadets in other campus celebrations. “When people see that the administration is welcoming (ROTC cadets) and not putting them in a silo, http://universitybusiness.com
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