Web posted Sunday, October 14, 2001

Harvard should let ROTC on campus

Harvard College should shake loose from the '60s and '70s and rejoin the rest of the country by allowing the ROTC back on campus.

The Reserve Officers Training Corps gives college students scholarships of up to $20,000 a year in exchange for a commitment to serve four years of active military service. Although much diminished because of a smaller military, it is still a fixture on many campuses.

It is no fixture at all at Harvard. The college banished ROTC in 1969 out of opposition to the Vietnam War and in 1995 cut off funding altogether because the military's policy toward gays didn't square with Harvard's policy toward gays. ROTC is barred from on-campus recruiting and, unlike other campus organizations, is not allowed to set up a booth, distribute leaflets or stuff mailboxes. When it wants to contact students, it has to pay the U.S. Postal Service to do so. On a public campus, there would be a free-speech issue here, but Harvard is private and can suppress organizations it doesn't agree with.

Harvard students who want to participate in ROTC -- and 43 of them do in spite of the obstacles -- must go to nearby MIT for their 10 hours of weekly drill and classroom work. Since Harvard won't reimburse MIT for the $135,000 to $150,000 annual cost for its cadets, alumni donors do -- and this from a school that has a $19 billion endowment.

There is a nasty whiff of elitism about Harvard's continuing ban on ROTC -- that while it's in the natural order of things for Harvard alums to shuttle between Cambridge, Mass., and the higher reaches of government to plan wars, it's up to others to fight them.

If Harvard opened its campus to ROTC, perhaps other elite schools that barred the program -- Columbia, Yale, Stanford, Brown -- would, too.

A smaller, professional military is in danger of being divorced from the American public, and that makes it ever more important that its officers be drawn from the broad spectrum of American life -- and that includes Harvard.