The Soldiers From Standard Oil

ROTC, Harvard and American Foreign Policy

By BRIAN GALLAGHER

In a glowing and laudatory report on college students who join the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at nearby schools while enrolled at prestigious universities from whence ROTC was banned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the New York Times has eased the way for colleges such as Harvard to ditch their ROTC ban and become in practice, not just in theory, fully supportive of the US government’s militarized foreign policy.

The New York Times (The ROTC Dilemma) presents us with the travails of Harvard undergrads who have to rise at 4:45am and shave then drive or jog across the beloved and revered (no matter how compromised) River Charles in order to reach Boston University, where, “under a system developed by the military that allows host universities to serve nearby campuses”(NYT 10/26/09), they may be trained as officers ready to serve the interests of their country’s leadership. The car used for this daily trip costs between $250 to $300 a month to maintain, the Times also lets us know, as if the civilians of Cambridge and Boston get a discount.

“It’s worse at Yale,” laments the Times’ author, Michael Winerip, who reports that there anyone wanting to be in ROTC must endure a 90 minute drive to UConn and request class notes from a friend. Winerip notes that this June, only 8 ROTC members will graduate while a half century ago, in 1959, 121 seniors were commissioned as officers.

Full Story Brian Gallagher: The Soldiers From Standard Oil.