opinion
The ROTC question
Editor’s note: The following statement is excerpted
from a motion Prof. Bayard McConnaughey will pres
ent today to the Faculty Senate.
Mr. President, members of the faculty:
I dread bringing this question before you again be
cause I know how much misunderstanding, resentment
and ridicule it brings upon me. However, the problems we
face are so compelling that these questions should be
under continuous review.
I have no intention to impune the character, sincerity
or competence of the people in our ROTC program. They
are good people, and the program is successful from their
point of view.
I have met both Col. Davis and Col. Wagner and am
glad to say that I like both of them. They represent our
armed forces at their best. Col. Wagner even helped me
prepare this presentation by freely supplying some fig
ures I wanted and by giving me permission to quote from a
recent interview.
Some of you feel that I am wasting your time and
mine on a question that has been adequately considered
and settled, and that one should not stir up controversy
where none exists at the moment.
I think it is good for us, and for our students, for the
faculty to concern itself with issues that go beyond univer
sity housekeeping and go to the heart of moral or ethical
problems arising from the relationship of the University to
problems of our time — questions upon which there is
honest and wide divergence of opinion and much dogma
tic misunderstanding. It is the controversial aspects of
questions upon which all of us stand in greatest need for
clarification.
I also thought it would be of interest to try to quantify
the change of attitudes all of us have sensed since our
government stopped kidnaping our sons and sending
them off illegally to the meat grinder in Vietnam to fight
peoples they knew knothing about, who had never been
any threat to us, and with whom we were not at war.
At the height of this, many of us were aware that
something dreadfully wrong was going on, but now we
have relaxed, tried to put it out of our minds as a bad
dream. The votes of this faculty during the height of the
draft, and today, may serve as one item in the measure
ment of this moral relaxation.
As to my qualifications to discuss military matters —
it is everyone’s responsibility to try to understand the
critical issues of their time and to communicate with
others about them.
I feel that I have had a good chance to examine these
questions at first hand. Some months prior to and follow
ing Pearl Harbor I was a camouflage engineer for the
USED in Hawaii. I was present at Pearl Harbor and have
had the experience of hearing bombs shrieking down
upon me, and have seen the havoc they create. Later I
was drafted, went through boot camp at Schoffield Bar
racks and later through six weeks of intensive training in
guerilla jungle warfare. I was assigned to the 65th combat
engineers as a camouflage man. I have worked on most
of the important military installations on Oahu.
At my request, I was transfered to the Central Pacific
Area Medical Laboratory and worked there for the rest of
the war and for six months thereafter. I spent a month on
Kwajalein Atoll, immediately after its capture, on a pre
ventative dysentery survey, six months on Okinawa for
which I have battle stripes, and six months in Korea. Our
outfit was given a unit citation for work done on the prep
aration of blood samples from which the virus of Dengue
Fever was isolated — work in which I participated.
I have visited numerous military installations
during and since the war, including the underground
Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, and
the Rand Corporation near Los Angeles, and have seen
their incredible facilities for command coordination and
information gathering.
I feel that with my 51 months of overseas wartime
service, I have been well exposed to the security estab
lishment and its views. I understand and have experi
enced the terrible urgency of the proximate causes for
going to war — the horrible threat of Hitler, the Pearl
Harbor attack.
I also feel that being a biologist has given me a
valuable additional perspective. It is largely because of
this that I have changed my mind and concluded that the
entire thrust of the military approach to human problems
is both immoral and self defeating in spite of the dedica
tion and heroism of some of the personnel.
I used to take pride in my service—but no longer so. I
now see it as a serious moral and ethical mistake. Like
most young people I had not given the matter much
thought, nor had I had the experience in the military to
reflect upon. Also nuclear weapons had not been per
fected. These have changed things by several orders of
magnitude. We are now in an entirely new ball game but
mostly still thinking in terms of the old rules which no
longer apply.
Oregon Daily Emerald
May I now quote from an interview by Col.
Wagner: “For me it resolves to — so far as morality goes
— what allegiance do you have? If we have some al
legiance to the principles and ideals of freedom and
democracy as we understand them — then you also have
the obligation of defending these particular ideas. If this
means you would fight to preserve them, then it means
you would be for war in that particular instance. That
doesn't necessarily mean that you accept the idea of any
type of war as being moral, but it does say that there are
some things worth fighting for — and I think the individual
has to make a decision on that. Although I believe in an
overall morality, I think that in most cases the individual
has to look at the facts and make his own decision.”
I could almost have written that — with the reserva
tion that it is more difficult for the individual to look at the
facts when the government is deliberately lying to him
r
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about some, and concealing others. Many of our young
people made this decision with respect to the Vietnam
War, and tried to act upon it, with the result that some went
to prison and others are still exiles, for making this very
fight for their ideals which Col. Wagner and I both see as
their responsibility to make. Dedication to ideals entails
fighting for them at home as well as abroad.
Humanity currently spends over $300 billion annually
for “security.” This is a staggering expenditure. Yet our
insecurity has escalated geometrically along with the
constantly rising cost of “security,” and in my view, largely
because of our security effort.
Most of us can see the folly of someone else’s
excessive fears and military expenditures, but have a
completely blind spot for our own.
Proponents of military expenditures often quote
Baran and Sweezy’s book on Monopoly Capitalism be
cause it claims that our prosperity is solely due to military
spending. Since its appearance further studies in much
greater depth have been published.
Perhaps the most significant is that of Dr. Bruce
Russett, published by the Yale University Press, “What
Price Vigilence.” This is a study of how military expense in
the U.S. from 1938 through 1968 was related to the rest of
the economy. It has been hailed by several analysts as a
really significant contribution. Dr. Kenneth Boulding,
former president of the American Economics Association,
says of it, “Modern social science at its best.”
Some of the conclusions go farto dispel the myth that
military spending contributes to the health of our
economy. For example, nationally he finds that for every
billion spent for defense a'total of 134,000 jobs are
created. For each billion for non-denfense purposes
175,000 jobs are created. Defense spending is less labor
intensive and for each billion we put into defense instead
of into civilian areas we forgo a net loss of 41,000jobs. For
our $80 biillion defense budget we thus lose 3,380,000
jobs.
This is simply the initial job loss through investing in
defense rather than other areas, not taking into account
jobs that would be created by additional employment as
people bought more goods and sen/ices.
Another approach was to analyze for each dollar
spent for defense, how much additional money is not
spent in other sectors of the economy. He shows that for
each dollar spent in defense, an additional $1.30 is lost to
other areas of the economy. Thus for our $80 billion
defense budget there is a net loss to the civilian economy
of an additional $104 billion.
Our own Dr. Szymanski made a study relating de
fense spending to economic stagnation and unemploy
ment. He concludes that among industrialized nations,
those with higher military expenditures had lower growth
rates and greater unemployment.
Seymour Melmen shows that defense spending re
sults in great misuse of resources. Skilled men and
scarce resources are channeled out of productive use,
leaving the productive sectors of the economy without the
men and materials they need.
Now let us examine the relation of the University of
Oregon to the DOD on a cost/benefit basis.
Portion of academic and
administrative salaries at
the U. of O. funded by the
state, per year.
Classified staff (civil ser
vice, custodial, secretar
ial, technical etc.)
Student help funded by
state funds
Total
Portion of state allocation
to University going directly
to DOD annually, through
that part of income taxes
allocated to defense.
Additional money given di
rectly to ROTC by the Uni
versity as secretarial, cus
todial services, free park
ing etc.
$15,986,000
5,484,000
509,000
$21,979,000
$1,978,110
29,933
Total $2,008,103
Actually there are several indirect contributions not
figured into the above.
“Benefits" to University from DOD:
Tuition and scholarships
to cadets $50,500
Allowances for books, etc. 6,466
Cadets pay (mostly does
not go to the University) 76,000
DOD grants to University
science depts. etc. (total
for 1970-71 when at peak;
they are now only
$192,000) 510,000
Total $642,000
The DOD seems to be doing well, getting over $2
million, plus well trained officers, for an investment of
less than $650,000 per year. When this is brought to their
attention they will doubtless want to at least pay their own
way by returning the $29,933, especially since last year’s
survey showed them to be the only department without
grave financial difficulties. How much more logical it
would be to allocate this money to the library, one of the
hardest hit University services, as well as one of the most
vital, and which directly serves the entire University and
the community as well.
As I look at the human situation today I see no good
way out. Whatever we do we are going to be hurt, and hurt
badly. Humanity today is like a patient with an advanced
metastacizing cancer requiring radical surgery. This will
certainly be dangerous and painful, and may not succeed.
But to continue in present directions means certain death.
The end is, I believe, far closer than most of us dare think,
because all of our cirtical problems — resource exhaus
tion, pollution, population, weapons development — are
increasing at exponential rates. When anything is increasing
exponentially i n a finite system, the end comes with appal
ling speed and abruptness.
Let me conclude with a brief statement from a biolog
ical standpoint.
The rise of man contributes, at an ever accelerating
pace, to the instability of the world ecosystem. Our uncon
trolled population explosion and our new technology will
continue to augment this instability. We will continue to
destroy the few remaining wild areas, to introduce new
and deadly poisons into the biosphere in increasing
amounts, and to burn fossil fuels on such a scale as to
alter the composition of the world’s atmosphere in possi
bly catastrophic ways.
Every such change entails the extermination of
numerous animals and plants. For every conspicuous
species, whose passing we note, there are hundreds
which die unknown. We are now witnessing the fifth
worldwide ecosystem collapse, the first one brought
about, or at least greatly augmented by the proliferation
and activities of one species of animal, rather than by
geological or cosmic agencies.
For many reasons it is the large, long-lived, slowly
reproducing animals, and the highly specialized species,
that are obliterated during an ecosystem collapse. Man is
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