ROTC and Ivy and gays, oh my!
By Myopist Posted in Culture — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Via Instapundit I see the latest article about getting ROTC back into the Ivy League (how much ink has been spilled and how many phosphors have been radiated on this topic, anyway?)
Read on.
Needless to say, there's the usual sticking point:
Few debates better demonstrate America's cultural divide. Harvard's faculty, which voted to expel ROTC amid antiwar sentiment in 1969, now objects to the military's practice of prohibiting openly gay soldiers. That policy conflicts with the university's longstanding antidiscrimination policies. Bradley Epps, a Harvard literature professor and faculty adviser to a gay students' group, calls the military's practice "inconsistent with a liberal education and regime of tolerance and openness."
...although one does wonder whether they'd come up with something else, should the current controversy ever be resolved.
Speaking as a supporter of both gay marriage and a civilian* opponent of the policy that prevents gays from serving openly, I nonetheless favor the law that conditions certain federal funding to favorable ROTC conditions, and am profoundly unsympathetic to objections about such a policy. The universities were happy enough to take the money in the first place, yes? The military isn't an independent agency: oversight on policy comes from civilian government, and it seems disingenious to condemn on the one hand and tacitly support on the other. In other words, if you want to take a moral stance in opposition to government policy, fine. Don't take their dirty money, either.
Before all y'all start cheering that, bear in mind: I think the same thing applies to the Boy Scouts.
-M
*Which I understand immediately invalidates me in some people's eyes from being allowed to have an opinion on the subject. (Shrug) Funny, I heard something similar when the issue was my support of the Iraq War: didn't stop me then, won't stop me now.
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ROTC and Ivy and gays, oh my! 3 Comments (0 topical, 3 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
in my opinion.
I think, as a matter of principle, the federal government should aggessively move to take federal funding from any institution, high school or college, that places any impediment on military recruiting or officer training. Harvard's "policy" certainly doesn't have the same clout as a federal regulation that has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
There are a few students at Harvard who are enrolled in ROTC. They attend training, I believe, at MIT. This type of cross enrollment has been done for decades.
I don't see where the military is any better off with a Harvard grad than with a Kansas State grad. Indeed from life experience and absence of a sense of entitlement the services are probably better off not having ROTC at Ivy League schools.
If you check out the list that is now published on FAIR's site containing the schools who have gone public with their support (at least insofar as military recruiters on campus, which is somewhat of a different issue from ROTC) -- many of them are not Ivy-league schools. When I first posted that diary entry, the big institutions were the ones who had, for the most part, decided to come forward publicly; now a few others have as well.
In my opinion, this group was formed for the express purpose of protesting the war in Iraq, as well as the policies of the Bush Administration, through whatever means the faculty of these institutions found most adaptable to that purpose. It also served the secondary goal of bringing the "gays in the military" issue back to the front burner, and yes, to protest, however indirectly, the Boy Scouts' stance on gay scoutmasters. I am personally quite sure that all of these aims were crystal clear to the faculty members responsible for organizing on their respective campuses.
I had a diary entry related to this subject a while back, specifically regarding a recent federal court decision on the matter.