Keeping Up with the Joneses

Rougemont, Feb. 18—There is no reason that I know of to suppose that Princeton University is any more, or for that matter any less, sensible than any other university of its approximate size, and therefore the credit obviously goes to the entrepreneurs—in this case, the two or three undergraduates whose zeal and ingenuity are primarily responsible for the restoration of ROTC. Not quite the way it was before, when credit was given to undergraduates who took ROTC courses, and when instructors had faculty status. But ROTC is back on the campus, and if one looks for a symbolic close to the era of the great campus madness of the late Sixties, the development at Princeton will do as well as anything else.

The undeniable reason why Princeton is thus honored is that it is there that a young man from Ohio elected to go to college. T. Harding Jones, who graduates this year, matriculated in the fall of 1968, the most tumultuous year in recent American history. In his sophomore year, reacting to President Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia, undergraduate hell’s angels firebombed the ROTC building. The very next day, with the deliberation which it is the purpose of higher education to inspire, the august Princeton University Council, which is made up of students, faculty, administration, staff and alumni, and is presided over by the president himself, assembled; and panicked by 28 to thirteen to “determine ways to sever any association whatsoever with the Reserve Officer Training Corps.” I like that “whatsoever.” That’s the word you use when you wish publicly to blush about a past affiliation. Princeton University, in protest against the sanest military decision reached in Indochina in a decade, wished forever to cut any bond it had with the military.

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Rougemont, Feb. 18—There is no reason that I know of to suppose that Princeton University is any more, or for that matter any less, sensible than any other university of its approximate size, and therefore the credit obviously goes to the entrepreneurs—in this case, the two or three undergraduates whose zeal and ingenuity are primarily responsible for the restoration of ROTC. Not quite the way it was before, when credit was given to undergraduates who took ROTC courses, and when instructors had faculty status. But ROTC is back on the campus, and if one looks for a symbolic close to the era of the great campus madness of the late Sixties, the development at Princeton will do as well as anything else.

The undeniable reason why Princeton is thus honored is that it is there that a young man from Ohio elected to go to college. T. Harding Jones, who graduates this year, matriculated in the fall of 1968, the most tumultuous year in recent American history. In his sophomore year, reacting to President Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia, undergraduate hell’s angels firebombed the ROTC building. The very next day, with the deliberation which it is the purpose of higher education to inspire, the august Princeton University Council, which is made up of students, faculty, administration, staff and alumni, and is presided over by the president himself, assembled; and panicked by 28 to thirteen to “determine ways to sever any association whatsoever with the Reserve Officer Training Corps.” I like that “whatsoever.” That’s the word you use when you wish publicly to blush about a past affiliation. Princeton University, in protest against the sanest military decision reached in Indochina in a decade, wished forever to cut any bond it had with the military.