On September 11th, 2008, presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, visiting Columbia University for a forum on national service, addressed a question that has incited controversy at Columbia for nearly forty years: Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). John McCain spoke first: “Do you know that this school will not allow ROTC on its campus? I don’t think that’s right.” An instantaneous chorus of loud boos met his words. When Obama took the floor at his alma mater, however, he agreed with McCain. “Yes,” Obama replied. “The notion that young people here at Columbia...aren’t offered...the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake.” The crowd went silent.
According to a statement released days later by President Bollinger, Columbia’s opposition to ROTC predominantly stems from “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT)—a federal law that prevents openly gay people from serving in the military. Bollinger argued that DADT violates the discrimination policy of our school, and therefore that excluding ROTC represents a commitment to the "fundamental values of the University."
Opponents to ROTC contend that inviting back the military program would betray the interests of gay people. “Does the moral weight of the demands by gays and lesbians have less moral weight than demands by any other minority?” questioned outgoing University Provost Alan Brinkley. But what are the demands of gays and lesbians, and how they compare to the demands of other minorities?
As an institution, the military has often served as a crucial battleground for claiming political equality. G.W.F. Hegel describes military service as the “ultimate expression of the individual's recognition of his membership [in] the ethical community of the state.” Yet the military service of minorities encompasses a larger goal: to earn full legal and social membership that they have historically lacked. Minorities have long recognized the military’s role as a gateway to citizenship. For many, military service implies commitment to a social contract that the nation has yet to uphold.
Consider the case of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV). These Japanese American college students were enrolled in the ROTC program at the University of Hawaii. During Pearl Harbor, their ROTC units were mobilized and defended America throughout the attack. Due to a wider anti–Japanese backlash in the United States following the surprise assault, the military expelled the students from the ROTC program and forbid them from combat. As Japanese Americans endured one of the grossest violations of civil liberties to occur on American soil, however, these men drew up a petition. They requested that they be allowed to serve their country as non–combat civilian laborers. For nearly a year, they forsook their education to quarry rock for the war effort. While their fellow Japanese Americans were rounded up into concentration camps in other states on the West Coast, one of the students stated his goal: “to set a good and living exampleÉto show the way, to break the ice for other groups to demonstrate their Americanism.”
 Despite the internment camps, some Japanese–American citizens resolved to work with the U.S. government, creating a volunteer army unit which served in Europe during WWII. http://us_asians.tripod.com/timeline-1940.html |
Japanese Americans were not alone in their attempts to use the military to gain their proper place in society. At the outset of the First World War, African–American leader W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged blacks to “while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.” These words drew upon a long tradition: from Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution, to black soldiers who joined Union ranks under deeply discriminatory conditions during the Civil War. Yet Du Bois’s advice garnered heavy criticism from other black leaders, and his hope for civil equality following the war was dashed as returning black soldiers encountered a wave of violence and found their military records besmirched.
Indeed, Du Bois’s own life serves as a testament to the difficulties of achieving civic equality. Disillusioned by continued discrimination, Du Bois would eventually renounce his American citizenship and die in Ghana. Even one member of the patriotic VVV resigned when Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 consigned Japanese families to concentration camps: “I have nothing to do with that anymore...[my] dad is an enemy alien.” Though minorities can gain emancipation through military service, their gains are often limited and even take generations to realize. In 1948, President Truman signed an executive order to desegregate the military, declaring that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the Armed Forces.” Unfortunately, the United States remains far from realizing this goal. If such prejudice still exists sixty years later, it seems evident that military service, like other forms of civic participation, is not a guarantee of immediate or even long–term attainment of equality.
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The strategy of embracing the United States to gain civic freedoms is anathema at Columbia, where minorities need not fight for equal rights. To many students here, participation in a military that denies equality represents a betrayal of progressive politics. Compromise, accommodation, and sacrifice are unacceptable. An anti–Naval ROTC poster said it best: “No one has to JOIN a discriminatory organization to fight discrimination.”
I was one of the gay students to advocate for the return of ROTC, and my compatriots were mostly those who themselves had served in the military and faced the discrimination of DADT. Their rationale for joining the military mirrors that of other minorities. “Deep down in our hearts this was our ultimate goal,” said Shiro Amioka of VVV, “that the aberration of racial discrimination in respect to military service...would be gotten rid of. In fact that was our basic motivation—to show them that we were worthy of them.” In 2005, nearly 60 years later, Scott Stewart—School of General Studies ’09 and a gay veteran in support of ROTC at Columbia—echoed Amioka: “I joined the Army as an infantry soldier in order to fight DADT. I succeed by making my fellow soldiers and commanding officers aware that a good soldier is not a monopoly owned solely by straight soldiers.” In a statement released during the months of debate on campus, 104 retired generals and admirals of the U.S. military demonstrated the efficacy of Stewart’s protest by calling for a repeal of DADT. The military leaders declared that they respect gay service–members, and affirmed gay servicemen and women “have served their nation honorably.”
Make no mistake: when Alan Brinkley refers to the “moral weight of the demands by gays and lesbians” in his justification for keeping ROTC programs off of campus, he does not refer to all gays and lesbians. An estimated 65,000 gays and lesbians currently serve in the armed forces. By excluding the military at Columbia and other elite universities, we exclude them as well. This fact became cruelly apparent during a campus panel on ROTC, as two gay students opposed to ROTC argued against the pleas of two gay veterans.
By upholding a ban on ROTC, we do affirm a commitment to certain principles (or at least one interpretation of these principles—many other schools have non–discrimination policies and continue to host ROTC). But we do so at the expense of the principles of thousands of others—including blacks, women, Japanese, and gay people—who have sacrificed much to serve their nation.
At Columbia, two diametrically opposed attitudes exist towards ending discrimination and achieving political equality: one that encourages protest, the other, participation. Students are free to protest. Will Columbia allow them the right to participate?
Above: Columbia students and alumni have made repeated efforts to reintroduce ROTC on campus, most recently in 2005 and again this past fall. Photo courtesy of ROTC Advocacy at Columbia, http://advocatesforrotc.org/columbia/photos.html.
LEARNED FOOTE is a Columbia College sophomore. He can be reached at lmf2122@columbia.edu.