Weighing In: Speaking Out Against ROTC

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama called upon “all our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC.”

Harvard students have taken this as a direct plea to Harvard University to recognize ROTC and commence military recruitment on campus now that the discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy has been repealed.
Lucas Swisher wrote in his last HPRgument post that the only question remaining is “whether college campuses are ready to respect the military and the cadets who serve and protect our freedoms every day.” In fact, President Drew Faust has announced that she is currently negotiating with officials to determine the future status of ROTC at Harvard. Concerned students on all sides of the issue hope that she is paying attention to student and faculty opinions as well.
Last Friday, Samuel Bakkila and Jia Hui Lee wrote an op-ed in the Crimson on the military’s continued discrimination against transgender and intersex individuals, who are still not allowed to serve openly. In contrast, this Monday, the Crimson staff published an editorial that made the profoundly distressing declaration that “we do not feel that [the exclusion of transgender individuals] is sufficient justification for singling out the military for campus opprobrium.”
More alarmingly, the Crimson also comments that “such objections to ROTC only emerged in the public discourse after the repeal of DADT.” They, like many pro-ROTC advocates, seem to characterize attention to transgender discrimination as a “convenient excuse” for anti-military Americans to prevent ROTC’s return without explicitly objecting to the military.
In my opinion, this sort of accusation is extremely insensitive, let alone politically incorrect—discrimination against transgender people is an issue that should concern all open-minded humans, not only college QSAs. But perhaps it is true that, consciously or unconsciously, Americans who simply don’t want ROTC to return are focusing more on the issue of transgender rights than they were before.
In fact, I admit that I might be one of them. I took the paragraph about transgender discrimination out of my November 24^thCrimson article before publication, but now frequently bring the issue up in discussions about ROTC. However, I don’t see this as hypocrisy. I don’t want the military to recruit on my college campus—so why should I not use the most potent persuasive devices at my disposal to keep it away?
On the other hand, I don’t think that anyone should hide their true opinions about the military behind rhetoric about transgender rights. There are many justifiable and socially acceptable reasons to object to the US military, ranging from widespread sexual assault to its anti-humanitarian actions to its current engagement in unjust wars.
Are all those people talking about trans rights really closet military haters? Most likely not, but either way, Americans should feel confident that they can openly critique the military’s policies and actions without fearing the destruction of their future political careers or social banishment. But in the meantime, there is certainly no excuse for Americans to discount the arguments of trans rights advocates simply because they seem to be “pacifists in disguise.”
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