The tenor of the new debate on ROTC speaks a great deal to campus attitudes towards the military, and to campus activism in general.
When I was accepted to Harvard, a frequent piece of advice given to me was something along the lines of “Don’t let the liberals up there change your views.” While everyone I knew was supportive of my college decision, my Southern and conservative friends and family were only half-joking when they worried about the politics at Harvard. To many, the “Kremlin on the Charles” comes to mind when thinking about political activism at Harvard. Other well-known institutions, especially the rest of the Ivy League, fell within the broad designation of bastions of liberalism. Certainly among even the rarefied, progressive air of the university, in the arena of activism, Harvard students certainly earned their reputation as firebrand liberals. After all, Harvard students during the protests of the 1960s were strongly implicated in setting alight the ROTC building in a literal manifestation of their rage against the military. In those more blustery days of spitting on uniforms and shouts of rage, students seemed unconcerned with developing a national identity of raging against long-respected institutions of the United States.
For these and many other reasons, Harvard has fairly earned that Soviet-esqe appellation attributed to President Richard Nixon. And when I first arrived on campus, I expected that notion to be reinforced, for the most part. I will hardly go so far as to say that my image of Harvard as a liberal environment has been changed. Of my friends who are active politically, a good majority of them identify as liberal. Yet, in some respects, Harvard students, and students of elite institutions, are not quite the wild-eyed radicals that I imagined them to be. Most notably, the debate over ROTC has demonstrated an interesting shift in university opinion. The relatively quick return of ROTC to Harvard’s campus after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the renewed debate at other institutions indicate that the days of the extreme campus radical as the mainstream view have largely passed.
To be fair, in one sense, the struggle to return ROTC at Harvard was hardly quick. After the initial expulsion from Harvard, ROTC was kept off campus for a variety of reasons, all ranging along a spectrum from ridiculous to petulant, such as the popular yet tenuous connection raised in the 1980s between President Reagan’s cuts to civilian aid and ROTC. The Crimson‘s 1989 definitive statement against ROTC seems, well, definitive. After the passage of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the most immediate criticism of ROTC, and the official justification for its exclusion by the administration, was that ROTC was incompatible with anti-discrimination policies. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that for many, DADT provided a convenient excuse for a general anti-military stance. Why, then, in the wake of Drew Faust’s agreement to reinstate ROTC, have we seen nary a whimper from the anti-ROTC crowd?
That a student survey conducted by the Harvard Republican Club indicated broad support for the return of ROTC lends some explanation to the lack of anger over its return. The fact that the only protests against ROTC’s return were sporadic and sparsely attended indicates that Harvard students, if not in total support, were not riled up enough to protest in the tradition of Harvard alumni.
This shift away from radicalism is not unique to Harvard, however. Columbia University, itself known for its protesting ways, has been the latest university to grapple with the return of ROTC. Now, even in this more moderate age on campuses, we couldn’t expect the ROTC debate to pass at Columbia without some incidents. The most odious of the protests was the heckling of a disabled veteran of the Iraq war during a student panel. Within the pages of the Spectator, anti-ROTC activists made their arguments, although statements such as this:
Many more students have grown up in countries whose dictators and police were trained by the US military, come from countries that have been invaded and occupied by the US military, or come from countries with their own military dictatorships where the daily realities of violence are an urgent reminder as to why the civilian and the military must be kept separate.
perhaps should not be dignified with the term “argument.”
What is most notable is that beyond the few heckles and screeds at Columbia, the actual debate was fairly one-sided. Columbia’s University Senate overwhelmingly approved an overture to the military in order to bring back ROTC. At two of the most radical universities during the 1960s, ROTC, of all things, has been restored with fairly little controversy.
The decline in campus radicalism overall will lead to a better atmosphere of political discourse on Harvard’s campus. Debates on hot topics such as immigration and abortion are still heated, but I would never expect that activists would overrun University Hall to demand the Dream Act or the continued funding from Planned Parenthood. From my own experience, the raucous interruption of Eric Cantor’s speech at the IOP by the Harvard College Global Health and AIDS Coalition was received with disapproval by a number of left-leaning friends.
Ironically, this might make the conservative’s job on campus more difficult. Caricatures of the Harvard radical are more tenuous when there are very few Harvard radicals left on campus. In past decades, when radicals would destroy their credibility with extreme outbursts, it would be easy to simply brush off their arguments. A new age of more moderate discourse will actually provide a challenge to the Harvard conservative in underscoring the differences and advantages over a well-packaged, thoughtfully-presented liberal philosophy. Of course, Harvard is still overwhelmingly liberal, and I will likely not see the day when I won’t be able to make a “Kremlin on the Charles” joke. The days of the fire-bombing activist, however, are likely very much gone.
