Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs used to be common and uncontroversial on American college campuses. Then, during Vietnam, many schools severely downgraded or completely dropped ROTC. Today, ROTC programs exist but are hardly in evidence at many schools, particularly the Ivies.
In today’s Martin Center article, Gordon Bare, who went through ROTC at Penn, argues that the country would be better off if ROTC made a comeback.
He writes, “The armed forces have become increasingly divorced from the leading institutions of education and our broader society, with only a modest respite after 9/11. This trend has accelerated as campuses have become increasingly intolerant of any deviation from woke ideology. A high percentage of senior faculty members and administrators are aging Vietnam-era students, some of whom dodged the draft, and many of whom had their politics shaped by that period.”
True, and despite the efforts of the Biden administration to make the military “woke” and “green” most college administrators remain hostile to anything military.
Read the whole thing to find out why Bare believes that “campuses should go out of their way to make room for ROTC.”