The
Dec. 16 Wall Street Journal (online for subscribers only)
covered attempts to put ROTC programs and military recruiters back
on Ivy League campuses. As the Journal reports:
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....
Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz says faculty and students generally support Harvard's stand, while alumni -- and much of the public -- don't understand why the university would want to distance itself from the armed forces.
And then there's this revealing note:
At Harvard, the top-ranking Army cadet this semester [he trains at MIT] is senior Elliott Neal.... He says fellow Harvard students often treat him as a curiosity. "Gosh, you don't seem like you want to shoot people," Mr. Neal, 21, recalls being told recently.
I, too, wish the military would drop its retrograde, counter-productive anti-gay policy. But in the post Sept. 11 world, treating the U.S. military as if it were an entity we'd be better off without is worse than delusional. And if gay-tolerant Ivy League students are dissuaded from being recruited into the military, how is that going to help make the military more gay receptive?
Worse, the anti-ROTC position leads to gays (and gay-supportive
straights) being viewed as reflexively anti-military. That's about
the worst public relations message to send to the "red states" I
can imagine.