The approaches that colleges and universities use to accommodate hundreds of thousands of military veterans are too often confusing for the veterans themselves, other students, and faculty and staff members, writes Ellen Moore in Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus (Duke University Press, 2017).
That confusion needs urgently to be dealt with, because it involves so many veterans and so much money, says Ms. Moore, a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California at Berkeley. By the latest estimates, the Post-9/11 GI Bill will provide nearly 800,000 people — veterans and their dependents — with more than $12 billion in the 2018 fiscal year.
It is true, the author says, that many veterans struggle to succeed in higher education. But that problem is likelier to stem from struggles to unlearn a military way of life than from conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder or physical injuries, or from hostility to their presence of the sort that military advocates often claim is common. In fact, she writes, “symbols of military valorization and patriotism are the new normal on many campuses.”
But veterans on campuses find themselves amid a complex of conflicting forces, Ms. Moore explains in an interview. In her research, she found many students eager to help veterans with friendship and support. But she also found anxiety and uncertainty about that help, an anxiety that many veterans shared.
It doesn’t help, says Ms. Moore, that college employees often take direction from seminars and best-practices literature on how colleges should go about accommodating veterans. Specifically or tacitly, she says, those guides advise instructors and administrators that “if professors are critical of military policies, this can be offensive to veterans and should be avoided.”
While many veterans isolate themselves among their fellow enrolled veterans, Ms. Moore found, many others wish for opportunities to share their thoughts on military service and their critiques of the politics and ethics of the American military and war. They were grateful that she was interested in asking their thoughts. For one thing, she says, “they wanted to share their experiences for the benefit of other vets.”
When sensitivities dictate educational activities, and when a “militarized common sense” conflates support for veterans with acquiescence to American wars, Ms. Moore argues, educational ideals may go unmet. Not only are veterans then not accommodated, but the result can be “a stifling of healthy debate on campuses about these matters of utmost importance to the country.”
Another outcome is that veterans, many of whom enlisted with the enticement of post-military education benefits, do not receive the benefits of a sound college education, she says. Academics can “end up alienating many of the veterans that the supposed best practices are intended to support.”
