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Participation in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), the country’s college-based, officer commissioning program, is apparently up 27 percent over the last four years. That’s according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times by Larry Gordon:
Helped by the recession, more active recruiting and a sea change in student perceptions of the military, enrollment in ROTC programs on college campuses is booming.
Even with ongoing U.S. involvement in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, participation in the program has surged… to 56,757 men and women, according to the Defense Department. The military boosted the number of ROTC scholarships to help expand the wartime officer corps, and the recession made the offers attractive to students.
Several high profile colleges—Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale—also recently decided to bring ROTC programs back to campus, after Congress ended the military’s controversial Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in December.
While military training programs were controversial on many campuses during the Vietnam War, in most cases the programs never left, they just grew unpopular. The state of the economy has helped to turn that around.
The Navy recently signed agreements to bring ROTC back to Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. According to the article many interested parties say that “the recent change of heart by influential American universities will boost the prestige of the program, which was founded during the Civil War on the belief that the nation needs a well-educated officer corps imbued with civilian values.”
Does that mean we’re going to start winning some of our wars again?
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bob on June 04, 2011 8:44 AM:
Restoring ROTC is a very bad idea just now. The ROTC Vitalization Act of 1964 provides that no ROTC unit may be "maintained at an institution unless the senior commissioned officer of the armed force concerned who is assigned to the program at that institution is given the academic rank of professor ... and the institution adopts, as a part of its curriculum, a four-year course of military instruction ... which the Secretary of the military department concerned prescribes and conducts..." http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/10C103.txt. This law, still in effect, is the reason leading universities such as Yale gave for dropping ROTC in the '60s, but they seem to have forgotten. Restoring ROTC with this law in place is a horrible idea.
NO outside institutions get to designate professors or prescribe curricula; that is the privilege of the faculty. Bad in itself, this would be worse as a precedent, since many wealthy individuals and organizations with political or other agendas (Koch Brothers, for example) would love to fund programs and designate the faculty to be hired.