From Change magazine, Volume 7, September 1975
During the late 1960s, survivors of that tumultuous decade will recall, one of the prime targets of campus militants was ROTC - the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Some of the activists and their sympathizers, particularly faculty, insisted that ROTC's presence on campus jeopardized academic freedom. But the main reason ROTC received so much flak was because it supplied the military with most of the officers it needed in Vietnam.
Cripple ROTC, radical theoreticians pointed out, and you crippled the American "war machine." In spite of all the protests and disruptions it endured, ROTC emerged from those years far from crushed. Though kicked off a number of campuses in the Northeast and almost totally banished from the liberal Ivy League-hundreds of ROTC units around the country remained intact. At the close of the 1969-70 academic year, total enrollment in ROTC was still a respectable 200,000. Today, halfway through the seventies, there is a new calm on campus. The antiwar movement is dead, and the anti-ROTC movement was buried with it. Yet ROTC, its ranks now depleted to less than 70,000, is still struggling to heal its wounds.
ROTC - at least until recently -has had a long and glorious history. Though founded in its present form less than 60 years ago, the concept on which ROTC is based--the idea of the student-soldier- has been bandied about since the earliest days of the Republic. Thomas Jefferson wrote James Monroe: "We must make military instruction a regular part of collegiate instruction. We can never be safe until this is done."
The actual groundwork for ROTC was laid in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when the Congress, unhappy over the poor record of the Union Army, hurriedly passed the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. This unusual piece of legislation provided for the donation of a sizable land grant to at least one college or university in each state in return for which the institution would offer a program of instruction in the military science. The act's purpose was twofold: first, to create a nucleus of educated citizens throughout the country who could be called to arms in case of a national emergency; and second, to obstruct the development of a Junkerlike officer caste.
But things didn't work out as Congress had hoped. More than enough colleges snapped up the government's generous offer-about 60 by the turn of the century - but as they lacked a common standard of training, they were not able to produce a truly reliable Army reserve.
The situation was finally remedied in 1916 when the Army's numerous campus affiliates were organized into one highly professional Reserve Of. ficer Training Corps. Within 10 years the number of colleges requiring military training grew from 62 to 220; the number of officer cadets from
40,000 to over 100,000. Army ROTC did not even have to fight to become a campus institution. In 1926 a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps was established, and Air Force ROTC was added in 1949.
World War II gave ROTC a good chance to prove its worth. Within six months of Pearl Harbor, more than 52,000 students with ROTC training were called to active duty; thousands of ROTC alumni were used later. Apparently, they acquitted themselves well. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall said at the end of the war, The most valuable asset we have had in this emergency has been the product of ROTC."
ROTC's star -and enrollment - began to fall in the early 1960s. Administrators at most institutions with ROTC reacted to the more liberal mood of the day and the persistent complaints of students and made enlistment in the corps optional.
Then came Vietnam. For the first time, members of the educational community were forced to question the ethics of the close working relationship between the military and academe. Stained by its involvement in what was generally considered an unnecessary and immoral war, ROTC was viewed as an unpleasant intrusion on campuses at best. Once cheered when they walked across campus in uniform, ROTC cadets were openly despised.
The stigma persisted. Even today, students at many campuses-even in the South, the section of the country traditionally most partial to the military -are reluctant to join ROTC for fear of being ostracized by their peers or instructors. "There is no question that the anti-ROTC protests of the late 1960s hurt us," says Col. I.J. Irwin, Jr., a deputy commander of Army ROTC's First Region, headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. (The First Region includes most of the Army's campus units east of the Mississippi.)
Things have been particularly rough for ROTC in the Northeast. Col. Robert Chamberlain, professor of military science at Cornell University, which experienced a wave of intense anti-ROTC sentiment some years back, explains: "ROTC suffered from a bad image at Cornell and nationally because of the public's unhappiness over Vietnam...." Air Force ROTC, perhaps because of its association in the public mind with the bombing of North Vietnam, has a similar sort of image problem. "A lot of people think we're all just a bunch of killers," says one instructor at Cornell.
However, though Vietnam hurt, ROTC was dealt an even graver blow in 1970, when Congress, upon the urging of President Nixon, voted to replace the military draft with a lottery. About a year later, Congress abolished conscription altogether and instituted the volunteer Army. In the past, many students who opted to take ROTC training had been motivated by a desire to avoid the rigors of life as an Army or Marine enlistee.
"If I have to serve," they reasoned, "I might as well serve as an officer." Now, with the compulsion removed, ROTC's appeal remained strong only for those who would have wanted to join anyway, and there were not many. Irwin concedes, With the tapering off and eventual termination of the draft and the possibility of conscription minimized or gone, fewer and fewer students felt that ROTC would benefit them." ROTC had lost its trump card.
Pentagon officials hastily drafted a series of reforms designed to stem the rising tide of disillusionment with the corps, as well as with the military in general. Leadership Laboratory, long one of the more obnoxious aspects of the ROTC regimen, was replaced with courses on more cerebral subjects, such as political history and strategic planning, in an attempt to enhance the program's academic respectability.
Since then various other enrollment-boosting devices have been employed. The monthly stipend for cadets has been increased from $50 to $100.
More scholarships have been made available.
Women have been allowed into the corps. Millions of dollars have been spent on advertising. And still, at many schools, the rolls continue to drop.
Even ROTC's quest for intellectual respectability has not succeeded, as evidenced by the refusal of many college faculties to grant the program full academic credit.
ROTC officials tend to put up a cheerful front about their problems. "Our image seems to be improving now as Vietnam fades as an issue and the economy falters," says Col. Chamberlain.
"Economic necessity now makes the Army and ROTC more attractive alternatives. A decent job at good pay for a two- to four-year period is attractive to practical people." To be sure, there is room for optimism. Last January the Pentagon announced that ROTC's enrollment of 67,999 actually represented a 7.5 percent increase over the number of the previous year. All the same, the increase was not nearly enough to allay the recurrent doubts about ROTC's future. The three armed services still depend on ROTC to supply a large percentage of the officers they need each year. And if the program, instead of growing, suffers another precipitous decline, it is conceivable that Congress might step in and cut off its funds. The Pentagon would then be forced to expand its two other existing sources of officers- the service academies and Officer Candidate Schools. Indeed, plans are already afoot to do just this.
Perhaps it would be just as well. After all, ROTC doesn't really belong on campus-or does it? Stuart Loory, author of Defeated: Inside the Military Establishment and Kiplinger Professor of Public Affairs Reporting at Ohio State University, thinks it does. "I certainly think ROTC has a place on campus," he says, "although I do think its intellectual and academic content can be upgraded vastly. As long as it is not compulsory, I see no threat by it to the academic freedom of students. And as far as the faculty or a university as a whole is concerned, ROTC does not represent nearly the threat that government consultation by civilian faculty members does." In the final analysis, however, students themselves will probably have the last word on whether ROTC belongs on the nation's campuses.