-—-opinion
ROTC provides training, not education
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do or die.
The Victorian and present-day essence of the good
soldier: neither questioning orders nor expressing doubts
about their morality, he goes compliantly into battle.
Regardless of the euphemisms used by the Depart
ment of Defense Office of Obfuscation, the purpose of
military training is to produce men who may one day be
ordered to destroy human beihgs. To accomplish this, the
ROTC, like other military training units, emphasizes in
doctrination, discipline and unquestioning obedience. In
the classroom, ROTC cadets might discuss questions
relevant to the trade such as "Why were the Vietnamese
able to pin us down for so long as Khe Sanh?"; but I doubt
that any cadet would seriously raise issues such as "The
racist factor in America’s war against Vietnam,” or “The
failure of American neo-colonialism in Southeast Asia."
ROTC has correctly labelled itself as a "training corps." It
is precisely that; it is not an educational program. The
ROTC does not “reason whv "
In past debates on the ROTC in the University As
sembly, faculty apologists have advanced the argument
that military training in a university environment will
"liberalize" the military. If the tacit premise behind this
argument is that the military is not liberal, I agree.
By liberalize, the apologists may mean that military
training on campus will somehow create in the Pentagon
an open-mindedness that is receptive to political,
economic and social reforms. These reforms might in
clude the transferring of federal funds from the production
of military non-goods to the financing of social goods like
health and day-care services (or even higher education).
What has not been explained is how liberal ideas, once
implanted in the minds of cadets, are to pass into the
minds of the oligarchs on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Perhaps by a process of intellectual osmosis.
We should not deceive ourselves. Those who make
far-reaching decisions of military policy are not the ROTC
cadets who pass into the lowest commissioned ranks, but
an elite group selected from the graduates of the
government's military academies, those whom General
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opinion
ROTC: A military beachhead in academia
Why do we have the ROTC on campus? There are at
least two sets of reasons—one is the set the Department
of Defense has for wanting the ROTC at the University,
and the other is the set of reasons the University has.
Perhaps an examination of these sets may be useful in
arriving at an opinion as to whether the University should
continue its policy in this matter.
Advantages to the Military:
1. ROTC programs supply a sizeable portion of
commissioned officers, especially those who serve on a
short term basis. Thus 4 per cent of all active Air Force
Officers in 1976 and an estimated 75 per cent of active
* rmy officers were ROTC graduates
However, many of the ROTC programs produce very
few commissioned officers, the University of Oregon
being one of them. Over the past 10 years only 173
commissioned Air Force cadets have graduated, an aver
age of only about 17 per year. The Army has done some
what worse, averaging only 12 commissioned officers per
year in the last five years Why then does the Department
of Defense continue to fund such programs? There are
surely less expensive ways in which to obtain college
graduates as military officers, such as outright educa
tional grants to those college students who agree to serve
for three or four years in one of the branches of the
Military.
2 One reason is that the presence of an ROTC unit
on a campus is a reminder both to the college and univer
sity but also to the society as a whole of the far reaching,
pervasive authority of the Military in our country. The
■/ilitary maintains a base, a beachhead if you will, in the
^rery heart of academia: and it is good military strategy to
have such far flung bases if one wishes to continue to
have far flung influence.
3. Furthermore, the very nature of the intrusion is
such that it commands respect, not only from the
academic institution, but also from the larger society. The
Military does not come, hat and money in hand, asking the
University to set up a department of Military Science, a
department or program run and staffed in the usual way,
albeit largely on grant money. No, the Military comes with
its own program, its own self selected staff, who are
continued on its own budget, and who are directly subser
vient to supervision and direction from the Department of
Defense. The Military theh asks (commands?) that the
institution provide this department space and services at
the institution's own expense, and confer academic credit
on the curriculum of this department, which curriculum is
largely a standard package developed by the Department
of Defense.
To save face the University is allowed to conduct its
own post-hoc scrutiny of the curriculum offerings and of
the academic qualifications of the instructors in this im
posed department, even to set up an advisory committee
which is supposed to act as a watchdog over the entire
operation but which has more of a history of acting as an
advocate of the department. But all this is after-the-fact
acceptance of the complete usurpations of the far more
potent rights of the academic institution to select its own
faculty in its own way according to its own standards and
to maintain the usual internal control of the faculty through
salary, promotion, tenure, etc.
Why do academic institutions permit this intrusion on
their jealously guarded prerogatives, prerogatives which
promote academic freedom and help the institutions
maintain some sort of critical perspective on the rest of
society? One can only speculate, but some of the reasons
that come readily to the fore are:
1. The academic institutions are persuaded that
they would not be doing their proper patriotic duty if they
did not assist our military forces in this fashion;
2. They are afraid the local communities within
which they are embedded would be quite upset with them
(probably because the local communities have the
foregoing definition of patriotic duty, even if the academic
institution does not);
3. They are afraid the State Legislature, or
whomever the funds come from will "punish” the institu
tions financially for acting so unpatriotically and
4. ROTC supplies financial aid to approximately 30
students a year for two years (the number who get com
missioned), some of whom it could be argued may not
have attended or continued at the University without such
aid.
By way of demonstrating the basic intrusion on the
academic community that the ROTC represents it may be
helpful to contrast the present program with one that
would be indigenous to the University. If the University
were to design and staff its own department of military
science it would;
1. Recruit faculty with a diversity of experience and
perspectives on military science. Some of whom may have
been in the military, some not, some, perhaps, with foreign
backgrounds. They would have studied the use of military
force from various viewpoints—economic, environmen
tal. political, historical, and/or social, and thus their basic
scholarly committment is apt to be in one of these fields.
Some of them at some points may be strongly critical of
the present military establishment. It would be entirely
appropnate for example, for Bayard McConnaughey to be
on the faculty of such a department.
2. The faculty would be employed by the University
and some of them at least would be put on a tenure track.
Most, if not all of them would be subject to the promotion,
retention and salary schedules of the University.
3. If the funding came from outside the State System
of Education it would come in the form of a grant which the
University administrates and from which it takes a set
amount for overhead expenses.
What would not happen is that the Department of
Defense would design and staff its own department with
the University having only review powers. There is a
proper role for the University to play relative to our military
establishment, but ROTC represents a violation of that
role, not a fulfillment.
Andy Thompson
University Counseling Center
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dant, retired, has called the “hard core of high-ranking
professionals. ’ Their education, says General Shoup, “is
not... liberal or cultural. It produces tactics, doctrines,
traditions, and codes of the military trade. It produces
technicians and disciples, not philosophers.” (Atlantic
Monthly, April 1969). Military training on campus will not
liberalize the decision makers. Were the Joint Chiefs to
don blue jeans and wear long hair, it would not change the
nature of the animal. It would only mean that jeans and
long hair had become establishment.
A university should be an institution that gives broad
scope to free inquiry, encourages imaginative judgment,
and is instrumental in shaping an informed and insisting
intellect. The ROTC by its nature is opposed to the goals
of university education. It is the only program that is
traditionally, and by definition, anti-intellectual. To allow it
to remain on campus implies tacit faculty acceptance of
the ROTC’s denial of academic values.
Some faculty members have contended that to pass
an anti-ROTC motion would be no more than a slap on the
wrist of the Pentagon. I believe it will be something more
than that; at the very least, it will be a sharp rap on the
knuckles, and someone in the Pentagon will wince. At the
May meeting of the University Assembly, I urge faculty
members to vote for the McConnaughey motion and cast
the intruder out.
Guido Palandri
Assistant Head—Catalog Dept. Library
✓-opinion-.
ROTC reviving
The following article is reprinted from The Chris
tian Science Monitor at the request of an AFROTC
officer.
One sign that the volunteer Army may not be
such an impossible dream after all is the slow-but
steady revival of the Reserve Officers Training Corps
on college campuses.
Army ROTC enrollment has risen from a low of
33,000 in 1973 to 55,000 in 1976, with another in
crease expected in the fall of 1977. That doesn’t
compare with the 177,000 enrolled 10 years ago, but
at least the trend is in the right direction.
There's no mystery about what happened to
ROTC. It became the handy scapegoat, the easy
target, for college students who opposed the Viet
nam War. Some schools actually disbanded their
ROTC units under pressure from students and fac
ulty members.
Now the attitude toward ROTC is’changing. The
war is over; the high cost of college makes an ROTC
scholarship extremely attractive, and the overall
quality of ROTC courses (and instructors) has im
proved markedly since the late 1960s.
Some purists would argue, no doubt, that mili
tary science has no place in a civilian institution of
higher learning. But the fact is that training future
officers in such schools is good for the country be
cause it has a leavening effect on the strictly military
point of view.
The Army now gets six times as many officers
from ROTC as it does from West Point, and about
one-third of its generals are graduates of nonmilitary
institutions.
This is healthy situation for the armed forces and
a good omen for the future of the volunteer Army as
well.
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