ROTC: The Protesters' Next Target

ONE of America's proud traditions is the citizens' army. Another is the freedom of the nation's education institutions. Set up to guarantee the former, the Reserve Officers Training Corps is now under attack as a violation of the latter. To idealistic students and professors, ROTC has come to symbolize the university's "complicity" in alleged U.S. militarism, particularly the Viet Nam war. As such, it provides radical students with a highly visible target The ROTC, in fact, is a key target for the next wave of campus protests.

In theory, this should not seriously bother the Pentagon. "Rotsee," as collegians call it, remains highly popular. It supplies 50% of the Army's officers, 20% of the Navy's and 35% of the Air Force's. Army ROTC alone now enrolls 151,000 students on 268 campuses (v. 54 for the Navy and 208 for the Air Force). Many students are so eager for ROTC that next year the Army will add 16 more campuses. A student who signs up is committed to two years' active service as a second lieutenant. One attraction: he can boost his grades by taking relatively easy ROTC courses that carry as much as 30 hours of credit toward his B.A. degree. If he serves four years, he can get his entire undergraduate education paid for by the Army, plus $50 a month allowance. Now that draft deferments have ended for graduate students, ROTC looks like a bargain.

Violence Y. Reason. All the same, the Pentagon is understandably alarmed by the anti-ROTC movement. Though ROTC is thriving at some state universities and Catholic colleges, it is simultaneously being banished from the Ivy League, a major source of precisely the kind of citizen-officers who might normally leaven the military with needed intellect and imagination. By faculty vote, ROTC will be stripped of academic credit and relegated to an extracurricular activity at Yale and Harvard. Dartmouth is considering whether to reduce the number of ROTC courses that qualify for credit or to drop credit altogether if ROTC is not moved off campus and limited to summer training camps. Similar recommendations are pending at Cornell and Stanford.

Many critics fault ROTC on strictly academic grounds. As they see it, such boring trade-school courses as "military staff operations" have no more business being part of the college curriculum than the officer-instructors sent by the Pentagon--who must be accorded the rank and privileges of a full professor--have being part of the faculty. While overlooking the presence of similar non-military courses (accounting, physical education), the critics also tend to forget that universities themselves approve the ROTC instructors, many of whom are rising young officers who take graduate courses on the side. At Columbia, for example, one ROTC officer currently has 90 hours' credit in teaching ghetto children. The critics do have one important point: the intellectual respectability of ROTC courses varies wildly from school to school, partly because the quality of the teachers and the credit hours vary just as wildly.

At avant-garde campuses, where antimilitarism is now the prevailing style, ROTC students feel more socially out than ever. To compound their defensiveness, ROTC critics argue that the goals of the university and the military are antithetical. "The university seeks to promote democracy and equality and above all to prize independence of mind and judgment," says James R. Anderson, 29, a humanities instructor at Michigan State University, who spent two years in Army ROTC when he was an undergraduate. "The military," says Anderson, "stresses hierarchy, the solution to problems through violence rather than reason, and unquestioning obedience to commands from above. At heart, the institutions are completely contradictory."

Measuring Up. Or are they? ROTC goes back to the 1862 Morrill Act, which required colleges built on federal land grants to offer military training. Far from promoting militarism, the whole idea was to prevent the development of an inbred, professional Army by infusing the military with liberally educated officers. Once compulsory at most state campuses (but entirely voluntary since 1960), ROTC supplied 100,000 Army officers in World War II and a steady flow of career men in peacetime.

The program has produced three Chiefs of Staff: Leonard Wood, George Decker and George C. Marshall. Claire Chennault, Curtis LeMay and William Dean, the Korean War hero, were also ROTC-trained. Currently, about one-third of the Army generals are ROTC men, including five major generals who are commanding divisions in Viet Nam; only one division there is headed by a West Pointer. Says Brigadier General Clifford Hannum, head of the Army ROTC: "The worst thing you could do is cause the Army to turn inward for its officers."

Close-Order Rituals. Hannum's point is apparently lost on many critics, who see no disparity in arguing against ROTC while arguing for a volunteer army. Such an army might well need a larger supply of ROTC officers, even if only to curb the growth of a real U.S. officer caste. Meanwhile, wherever ROTC is made extracurricular, the almost certain result will be diminished enrollment. Ultimately, the military might have to turn elsewhere for officers.

Where? Officer Candidate Schools could be expanded to take up the slack; in its present form, though, OCS is basically a cram course, and the graduates show it. Only the Marine Corps, which shuns ROTC, is currently satisfied with turning collegians into officers solely at OCS bases and summer camps. For other branches, the service academies would have to be enlarged enormously. West Point, for example, will turn out only 750 second lieutenants this year, v. the 17,000 second lieutenants who will graduate from Army ROTC.

A third alternative, the reform of ROTC itself, seems to be the best solution. The reform is already under way. Drill, euphemistically known as "leadership laboratory," has been officially halved to an hour a week by both the Army and Navy, and will probably be eliminated entirely. The brass is well aware that undergraduates can no longer be made to plod through four years of weekly close-order rituals to master what basic trainees learn in the first few days of boot camp. Admits a high-ranking Army ROTC officer in the Pentagon: "Leadership laboratory may well be the program's worst enemy. It's got to go if we are to survive."

Track C. The Army is also revising its curriculum to include more academically oriented courses. At eleven campuses, it is now testing an experimental course known as Track C, which uses local civilian instructors to teach cadets in their first two years. In the course entitled "Concepts of Warfare and National Defense," for example, civilians teach the political, economic and geographical aspects while an Army officer expounds on the military side. In addition, the Army has raised the academic credentials of its professors of military science; it now demands that they hold at least a master's degree.

The most efficient way for ROTC to fight the movement to take away its academic credit is to liberalize its curriculum. Instead of asking faculties to accredit military courses, in fact, the Pentagon plans to accredit more academic courses for ROTC, such as economics, psychology and political science. Purely soldierly skills may increasingly be taught at summer camps rather than on campuses. The problem, though, is whether such compromises will satisfy the ROTC's fervent critics. The trouble is that more and more campus idealists seem to view all armies as evil, including armies that defend free societies.

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