Crimson Shame
Harvard’s ROTC problem.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
October 31, 2001 8:15 a.m.

very April 16, the state of Massachusetts celebrates "Patriots Day," a holiday that commemorates the start of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord. Veterans march in town parades, and at the original locations, Lexington and Concord are reenacted. When I was a graduate student at Harvard, I used to love going to those reenactments, which were just a few miles down the road. It bothered me that the Boston Marathon, held every Patriots Day, seemed to drain all the attention away from the reenactments — and from the meaning of the holiday itself. As my interest in the Revolution grew, I discovered that, for all the bookstores in Harvard Square, it was impossible to find the classic accounts of the battles of Lexington and Concord. I had to track down copies by going to the gift shops at the sites themselves.

After Lexington and Concord, the colonial army was headquartered on Cambridge Common, right in the middle of the Harvard campus. George Washington took command of the army on the common, and every child in Massachusetts used to revere "the Washington elm," the tree under which the great general received his command. When the tree finally died, it was made into a chair that now sits, hard by Harvard Yard, in Longfellow House, which served as Washington's headquarters during his first great victory — the expulsion of the British from Boston.

The entrance to the battle site at Concord is dominated by the famous statue of the Minute Man, the ultimate symbol of patriotism — the ordinary American who took up his musket to fight the British when liberty and country were under assault. (For a superb account of the Minute Men, and of the actions at Lexington and Concord, consult David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride.) So if patriotism in Massachusetts means anything, it means honoring and supporting the use of arms in defense of freedom and country.

But along with Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and the battle of Boston, the students and administrators of Harvard University have altogether forgotten the meaning of patriotism. The shameful, foolish, and hypocritical policy of banning the Reserve Officers Training Corps from the Harvard campus was never remotely justifiable. But today, when liberty and country are directly under attack, the students and administrators of Harvard University persist in insulting themselves and the rest of us by forbidding the ROTC from drilling on the grounds of Harvard, the very spot where George Washington drilled the Continental Army in preparation for the taking of Bunker Hill.

Why do the students and administrators of Harvard University do this? Supposedly it is because of their opposition to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but I don't believe that. The ROTC is banned from Harvard for the same reason that it's banned from Stanford, Yale, and Dartmouth. Because of a foolish and contemptible hatred of the military by a bunch of spoiled, elitist, and decidedly unpatriotic students who do not understand that everything they have depends upon the willingness of courageous young men to defend this country. (Women serve honorably as well, of course, but it's men whose lives are — rightly — most at risk.)

Harvard's policy is hypocritical, because the students and administrators of Harvard accept the protection of a military that they themselves will not support. Harvard's policy is foolish, because the honorable and courageous students who volunteer for the ROTC are the only thing standing between the spoiled and self-indulgent students of Harvard University and a draft. And Harvard's policy is shameful because it insults the memory and the principles of American patriotism at the very birthplace of American patriotism. Worse, the students and administrators of Harvard are so completely ignorant of their past that they are no longer capable of even recognizing the repudiation of their heritage that their policy represents.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that despite calls from some illustrious alumni, Harvard is unlikely to revoke its ban on the ROTC. A single member of the undergraduate council attempted to initiate a debate on the ban in October, but the debate was suppressed. Joe Wrinn, a spokesman for the university, explicitly denied the claim of critics that Harvard's ban on the ROTC was unpatriotic. Why? Because Harvard secures donors for the program. So it has come to this. Those who would volunteer to defend the United States are banned from the sacred and original ground of American patriotism, and we are told that money somehow makes it acceptable. I hope the Reserve Officer Training Corps will take Harvard's money and do with it as Mayor Giuliani did with the tainted ten million dollars from Saudi Arabia. I am proud of my country. But I am ashamed of Harvard University.