Last September, Barack Obama spoke at a forum on public service at Columbia University. “I recognize that there are students here who have differences in terms of military policy,” Obama, then a senator, said when the contentious issue of Columbia’s banishment of the Reserve Officer Training Corps from campus came up. “But the notion that young people here at Columbia or anywhere, in any university, aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake.” Obama’s comment helped push — albeit fleetingly — the status of ROTC into the bright light of the presidential campaign. But within academe, that debate, and related concerns about the marginalization of military history, has been raging for quite a while.
Tensions between the military and the university are hardly new or surprising; after all, the two institutions embrace different cultures, procedures, and purposes. But they managed to coexist in a dynamic tension until the antiwar movement of the 1960s severed the relationship at many colleges, opening a gap that persists to this day. Consider that Brown, Columbia, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale have all forsaken ROTC, and that the programs at Cornell and Princeton have not attracted large numbers of students over the years. (Those programs also draw cadets from nearby campuses.)
In recent years, student groups at some Ivy League universities have launched campaigns to bring ROTC back to their campuses. These initiatives are often coordinated with an umbrella alumni organization, Advocates for ROTC, which has worked behind the scenes and occasionally in more public ways to cajole members’ respective alma maters to restore ROTC to universities where it no longer operates, and to strengthen the program where it exists in a weakened form.
Although the pro-ROTC movements are relatively modest at most colleges, they are quite vigorous at Columbia and Harvard, where they have enjoyed some success. In 2002, Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, declared that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the time was ripe for the university to reconsider its objection to ROTC. For a variety of reasons — including his resignation, in 2006 — Harvard resisted taking concrete steps in that direction. But last spring, Drew Gilpin Faust, Summers’s successor, spoke at a ceremony for five Harvard students who had received commissions in ROTC programs that they had attended at nearby institutions. Saluting the graduates, she briefly raised the issue of homosexuality in the military: “I believe that every Harvard student should have the opportunity to serve in the military, as you do, and as those honored in the past have done.”
Faust’s comment referred to the government-mandated “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibits any outward expression of homosexuality in the military. Like many would-be backers of ROTC in the Ivy League, she appears to support the program’s return to Harvard if “don’t ask, don’t tell” is repealed. For example, at a meeting with the undergraduate council at Harvard last February, Faust remarked: “To get official recognition, a group cannot have any exclusionary rules. ... I look forward to the day when we can change our position on ROTC on campus.” Harvard ROTC advocates believe that momentum is slowly yet ineluctably turning their way, though much depends on the fate of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The most promising pro-ROTC movement is at Columbia. Four years ago, Columbia Students for ROTC, with the assistance of the Advocates for ROTC group, began an initiative to reinstate the program. In the fall of 2004, students voted in support of such a move in a campuswide referendum. The following spring, the University Senate, which was established in the wake of the famous upheavals at Columbia in 1968 — which also led to the abolition of ROTC the following year — rejected the proposal, citing opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the debate also revealed some antimilitary attitudes reminiscent of the late 1960s. The executive committee of the Student Senate of the Union Theological Seminary at Columbia declared that it opposed ROTC’s return to campus because of “the violence of militarism. ... Some of us are pacifists, and others of us simply reject the U.S. military in its current manifestation.” Students and faculty members have characterized the struggle at Columbia as a clash between two cultures and mentalities, a clash that runs deeper than mere opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Last November, encouraged by the imminent advent of the Obama administration, the Columbia College Student Council surveyed student opinion about the possible return of ROTC to campus. The measure fell just short of an affirmative vote, and according to Allan A. Silver, a professor of sociology at Columbia, “don’t ask, don’t tell” was the overwhelming reason. He and other ROTC supporters are heartened by indications that President Obama will move to encourage Congress to rescind “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Although the situation is more complex than many critics and apologists maintain, it is nonetheless clear that a wide gap divides the military and many major institutions of higher education. As David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, noted in Kathy Roth-Douquet’s and Frank Schaeffer’s book, AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes From the Military — and How It Hurts Our Country (Collins, 2006), “Here in academia, my colleagues seem determined to turn American soldiers into an out-of-sight, out-of-mind servant class who are expected to do their duty and keep their mouths shut.” And while ROTC thrives in many areas of the country — chiefly the South, Southwest, and parts of the Midwest — it languishes in heavily populated regions, especially in broad corridors of the Northeast, Northwest, and parts of the Midwest, such as Chicago.
In 2006 the Army ROTC came up 450 officers short of achieving its national goal for commissions. Colleges and the military together deserve some blame for that deficiency. The military prefers to concentrate its resources on areas and schools it considers likely to produce dedicated warriors, while many colleges are content to let other institutions bear the burden of national defense. Whatever the causes, the result is that some major universities have gone AWOL when it comes to military service.
That is especially troubling for those like Harvard and Columbia, which have historically prided themselves on educating the nation’s future leaders. As Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, noted in Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (PublicAffairs, 2006), Harvard’s disenfranchisement of ROTC — “one of its most powerful leadership training programs” — reflects the university’s “indifference to leadership.” Lewis added: “ROTC is a hard sell at Harvard because professors undervalue the life skills it teaches.”
Meanwhile, military history has become a matter of controversy in academe. Some observers believe that the field is flourishing, especially with the growth of such “new military history” approaches as cultural studies and the so-called “war and society” movement, which have broadened and enriched the study of war and its implications. Several universities house major military-history programs, including Duke University, Kansas State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Ohio State University.
But other observers are far less sanguine. I have interviewed several military historians who are anxious about the status of the field, especially the more-traditional studies of war and combat. John A. Lynn, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently surveyed issues of the bellwether journal The American Historical Review published from 1976 to 2006. According to Lynn, “During this time, the AHR failed to publish a single research article focused on the conduct of the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the wars of Louis XIV, the War of American Independence, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and World War II.” In addition, there were no articles about Vietnam, and only two on the American Civil War, one of which was simply an address by the recently named president of the American Historical Association.
Lynn, who published his findings in the journal Academic Questions, found that of the top 91 history programs, only four offer military history as a field for Ph.D. examinations. (He assumed that departments need at least two faculty members specializing in military history to qualify as a program. Some historians contend that this criterion is too demanding, thereby inflating the assessment of the problem.) He also reported that when the last military historian at Purdue University retired, in 1999, his department chair informed him that his position would not be filled, because, in Lynn’s words, “there was no social purpose to the study of military history.” If you talk with military historians and their allies today, they will tell you similar stories. At my own institution, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the history department had failed to replace the distinguished military historian Edward M. Coffman, who retired in 1992. But the department’s members did unanimously extend an offer recently to a career military officer who specializes in the history of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, and he has accepted. Maybe the tide is turning nationwide.
A gulf between the military and the university is not healthy for American democracy. The constitutional order requires a civil-military relationship that protects military professionalism and autonomy, while also honoring the principle and practice of civilian control. Public awareness of national-security matters allows for a more effective partnership between the military and society. A public ignorant of the proper role of the military can lead to three major problems: uncritical support for military actions, or what Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, calls the “new American militarism”; endorsement of an opposite, antimilitary ideology that perceives the armed forces as evil or as the “other”; or a simple lack of knowledge regarding the military and strategic-security matters. National security is the cardinal duty of the state, and debate about the appropriate means of achieving security is a matter of vital importance to us all.
A productive relationship between civilians and the military can be fostered in a number of ways, but no institution is more important than the university. In many respects, the university can provide a microcosm of the interactions among the military, civil society, and the government. Student soldiers and nonmilitary students can communicate on the campus in ways that foreshadow the subsequent relationship between politics and the military. The model of the citizen-soldier, the animating ideal of ROTC, is predicated on precisely that aspiration. Exposing future officers to the intellectual virtues of civilian universities improves and broadens the military mind, which contributes to the maintenance of appropriate civilian contact and control.
While I take that rationale seriously, there is another question we must consider: Do ROTC and military-strategic studies enhance the civic and liberal education of nonmilitary students?
That question has both empirical and normative dimensions. Empirically, the question is twofold. First, does a campus have ROTC? And does it provide courses in military history and strategic-security studies that have a military dimension? Second, to what extent do such programs have an impact on the knowledge and attitudes of nonmilitary students, and in what ways? A Wisconsin graduate student, Ilia Murtazashvili, and I are pursuing those questions in surveys and interviews with ROTC students and commanders, chairs of departments that have traditionally housed military-related studies, and nonmilitary students. Our evidence thus far indicates that such exposure is indeed beneficial.
I discern at least four ways in which exposure to military affairs can enhance civic and liberal education for nonmilitary students. First, knowledge of the military is an essential part of citizenship because of the military’s importance in national life. The decision to go to war is perhaps the most momentous decision that a political community can make. Civic responsibility requires that citizens have an adequate understanding of the military and war, the constitutional balance between the military and society, and the needs and contours of national security. The best way to prevent wars is to understand their causes, which requires the study of military history, diplomacy, and strategic security. But some wars need to be fought, however much we might regret having to do so.
The study of war can augment what the political-science and international-relations scholar Hans J. Morgenthau called “the higher practicality.” Writing in 1966, Morgenthau criticized the growing irrelevance of political science when it came to educating the public about the most salient issues of the day. The greatest political thinkers in history did not simply engage in abstract speculation; they applied their philosophical thought to pressing historical matters, such as war, revolution, social conflict, and justice. The “higher practicality” entails studying the ways in which the efforts of major political thinkers are “responses to [fundamental] challenges arising from political reality” — one of the classic aspirations of liberal education.
More broadly, studying war can reveal a great deal about the human condition. In “Federalist 51,” James Madison wrote, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” The same can be said about studying war. Thucydides, for example, teaches us that crisis and war often reveal a person’s and a people’s true character. Soldiers have written many moving essays and books about the philosophical and psychological implications of war, which range from nobility to debasement and from glory to tragedy. J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959) is a noteworthy example of this genre, as is Hannah Arendt’s insightful introduction to the 1967 reissue of the book.
Then there are the great literary works composed by such soldiers and nonsoldiers as Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy, who deal with questions of war, commitment, love, life, suffering, death, and, ultimately, meaning. Drew Gilpin Faust discussed the power of Bierce’s essays on the Civil War in her remarkable book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008). Based on his war experiences, Bierce “crafted unromanticized depictions of battle that reflected his fundamental approach to both writing and to life: ‘Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And ... most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.’” Such poignant works as Michael Gelven’s War and Existence: A Philosophical Inquiry (Penn State University Press, 1994) help us to think about why certain things are worth fighting for, and why our thinking about war tells us so much about our values and integrity.
In Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, 2007), Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale, criticizes contemporary education in the humanities for failing to help students grapple with fundamental questions: What is the meaning of mortality? How should I live? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Thinking about the pros and cons of war — and being exposed to those who will wage war in the future — can assist nonmilitary students in facing those and other important questions. Kronman attributes the demise of humanistic inquiry to several factors, including faculty members’ overemphasis on narrow research questions; the rise of political correctness, which restricts the flight of thought into forbidden areas; and the enervating force of excessive constructivism and postmodernism, which discourage the natural desire to discover and probe universal truths about the human dilemma. Is it an accident that the decline of military history has paralleled the broader decline of the humanities?
Third, studying the ethics and obligations of war concentrates thought about the moral complexities of citizenship in a liberal democracy. One particularly acute dilemma is the use and abuse of military power and organized violence. Reinhold Niebuhr recognized that liberal societies have a tendency to be utopian, making them reluctant to face some harsh realities, such as the unavoidable and difficult relationships among power, violence, justice, and national interest. Power and the legitimate use of violence (or the plausible threat of it) are sometimes necessary to protect security and justice in a hostile world. But power and violence are subject to abuse, and they seem to contradict liberal democracies’ commitment to the Enlightenment belief in peace and reason. Some police officers and soldiers have trouble reconciling the use of violence with conventional morality, and thereby forsake their respective duties by falling into a state of cognitive and moral dissonance. Thinking about the use and misuse of violence in war can help students resolve and appreciate those tensions, making them more aware of what Max Weber described as the “ethic of responsibility,” which calls for accepting the duty to act in the face of a tragic world replete with moral tensions and uncertain consequences. In other words, inquiries into war can help to make students more realistic, as well as more intellectually and morally mature.
Finally, an appropriate military presence can contribute to the intellectual and moral diversity on the campus. The military mind contrasts sharply with the conventional wisdom and assumptions of most of today’s college students. In his classic 1957 book, The Soldier and the State, Samuel P. Huntington portrayed the “military mind” as predicated on “conservative realism.” At that time, conservative realism was not a partisan concept, because military leadership strove to be nonpartisan, and the partisanship that did exist was fairly evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats. (Today military leaders are much more likely to be Republicans than in the past — yet another sign of the broader gap between the military and universities.) According to Huntington, the military mind believes that the nation-state is necessary to deal with the darker aspects of human nature and political communities: “Man has elements of goodness, strength, and reason, but he is also evil, weak, and irrational. The man of the military ethic is essentially the man of Hobbes.”
That logic is an alternative to the progressivism that dominates many campuses today, and to the plethora of programs dedicated to world and global citizenship as opposed to national citizenship. Liberal education requires exposing students to the fullest array of worldviews, including the military mind and conservative realism.
Then there is the matter of lifestyle. ROTC students must act according to special codes of discipline and conduct. They are often required to wake up before dawn, and although they seek out fun, my interviews with cadets reveal that they tend to define themselves primarily in terms of duty to their country. Patriotic nonmilitary students are typically more committed to self-advancement and individual rights. ROTC students, by contrast, provide a concrete example of a duty-based outlook.
Challenging the basic assumptions of any institution — be it a country or a college — is itself a way to improve that institution. This point applies in a special way to universities, which pride themselves on promoting dissent and Socratic questioning. And who can deny that higher education stands in need of improvement?
Donald A. Downs is a professor of political science, law, and journalism at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy there. He is writing a book on the military presence on campuses and the civic education of nonmilitary students.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 36, Page B8
