University of Virginia Library

ROTC And Academia: A Reassessment

—ed.

One of the unintended domestic consequences
of the war in Vietnam has been the growing
awareness of the dangers of intimate connections
between the military and academia.

Perhaps the most blatant example of colleges
and universities willingly performing functions
that are rightly the exclusive concern of the
military is the Reserve Officer Training Corps
(ROTC).

After many years of relatively tranquil
existence on the nation's campuses, ROTC has
come under fire of late from those who believe
that philosophically and pedagogically, military
training has no place in an academic institution.

In recent months such leading institutions as
Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford
have all taken steps toward reworking academic
credit from their ROTC programs. Currently,
many other colleges and universities are also
re-evaluating the status of their own ROTC
programs.

The Stanford decision is especially significant
because it was premised on philosophic rather than
pragmatic grounds. As a member of the committee
which prepared the report explained, "We began
with a definition of the university and found an
essential conflict between this and the concept of
ROTC." Academia's traditional function is to
inspire critical thinking about man and his society
aloof from partisan or superficial considerations.
But it is impossible for colleges and universities
even to pretend to perform this unique role if they
are also subsidizing the brutal militarism of the
outside world.

Some have argued that academic institutions,
especially those which are publicly sponsored,
have an obligation to be politically neutral and
that this neutrality requires the continued support
of ROTC programs on campus. At a time when the
military is an integral element in an expansionist
foreign policy opposed by a sizeable segment of
the population both inside and outside academia,
it is clear that the ROTC program is as partisan in
its own way as Students for a Democratic Society.
Thus, in a modern context colleges and universities
are only politically neutral when they as
institutions stand between the government and its
critics. Clearly, continued academic support for
ROTC would be the height of political partisanship.

Hans Morganthau wrote recently that one of
the key lessons of the Vietnam War was the danger
of too intimate a relationship between the campus
and the government. For already, he noted, large
segments of the academic community have been
transformed "into a mere extension of the
government bureaucracy, defending and implementing
policies regardless of their objective
merits." ROTC is not only antithetical to the
ultimate purposes of higher education, but
contrary to basic pedagogical principles as well.

While the development of critical thinking is an
integral part of a liberal education, the teaching
methods employed in ROTC programs tend to
emphasize rote learning the deference to authority.
This is far from surprising as critical thinking
has never been a highly prized military virtue.
Consequently, the ROTC program is geared to
produce intellectually stunted martinets.

An example of the type of educational thinking
behind the ROTC program at many universities is
provided by a solemn pronouncement made last
year by an ROTC officer at the University of
Minnesota. In a frighteningly serious echo of
Catch-22 he declared, "Marching is the basic
leadership program for every officer." Equally
alien to the ends of a liberal education is the
unquestioning submissiveness endemic in the
rigidly hierarchical structure of military education.
It is hard to develop any spontaneity - much less
dialogue - within the classroom when the
professor is not just a teacher, but a superior
officer as well.

For those congenitally unimpressed by philosophical
arguments predicated on the goals of
higher education, there are some equally potent
pragmatic reasons why ROTC is in no way a valid
academic offering.

A faculty curriculum committee at the
University of Michigan stated the case clearly
when it charged that ROTC course materials used
in Ann Arbor were "conjectural, non-analytical,
cheaply moralistic and often blatantly propagandistic."
The bulk of the ROTC program consists of
technical courses often less rigorous than similar
courses offered in the math, science and
engineering programs of most colleges and
universities.

Typical of those ROTC programs not duplicated
elsewhere is an Air Force ROTC course
entitled, "The history of the role of the Air Force
in U.S. Military history." Designed primarily to
inculcate institutional loyalty, rather than to
develop critical thinking, courses like this are
clearly not history. They are not even valid
military history since inter-service rivalry results in
an inflation of the role of the Air Force. The
intellectual vacuity of many ROTC courses is
directly related to the rather limited educational
backgrounds of the preponderance of ROTC
faculty.

Despite education which normally does not
exceed a bachelor's degree, ROTC instructors are
accorded a status comparable to professors in
more rigorous disciplines. And due to the high
degree of autonomy of the ROTC program,
colleges and universities have little direct control
over the hiring, firing or promotion of these ROTC
instructors.

But objections such as these spring primarily
from the form rather than the underlying
substance of ROTC. On a substantive level, it is
difficult to avoid the blunt assertion that training
soldiers whose ultimate aim is to kill is totally
hostile to the principles of academia.

It was the simplistic "my country right or
wrong" patriotism of the First World War which
spawned the original ROTC program. But one of
the clearest lessons of the Vietnam tragedy is that
such unquestioning support of government policy
is not only morally bankrupt, but counter to the
long-range interests of the nation as well as the
campus.

In order to reassert the sanctity of academia as
a morally and educationally autonomous institution,
it is necessary to end the universities' role as
the unquestioning servant of government and
military. The abolition of ROTC as a sanctioned
course offering would be a major step in this
direction.