Perspectives on the Future of ROTC at Columbia:

ROTC PANEL AND DISCUSSION

April 25, 2005

[Note: Eric Chen’s opening remarks were not recorded and are provided for the transcript. Eric Chen also acts as the moderator for the forum.]

ERIC CHEN: Hi. My name is Eric Chen and I am the spokesman for Advocates for Columbia ROTC. I welcome each of you today to our panel and discussion: Perspectives on the Future of ROTC at Columbia.

I want to thank our sponsoring groups for facilitating this event today: Advocates for Columbia ROTC, of course; Chris Higgins and Students United for America, where the ROTC movement began; Lyman Doyle and the Military in Business Association, for helping us with the venue and technical needs; Professor Michael Adler, in the Business School; the Columbia College Republicans, who have been with us since the beginning; and the Law School’s Federalist Society and their president. Spencer Marsden. Last but not least, we appreciate the continued support from the alumni in the Columbia Alliance for ROTC.

Our speakers today are Professor Jim Applegate, Co-Chair of the Senate Task Force on ROTC; Professor Lewis Cole, a student leader of the movement that removed ROTC from Columbia; Professor Allan Silver, who voted in favor of removing ROTC as a faculty member; Stephen Brozak, who graduated from General Studies in 1982 and the Business School in 1994—he retired in 2004 as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps –and was a Democratic Party candidate for the 7th Congressional District seat in New Jersey in 2004; Taylor Hwong, now attending the Business School, graduated from SEAS in 1992 and has served as an Army engineer officer in Iraq and Afghanistan; Scott Stewart is an Army veteran in General Studies and is the political affairs director of the College Democrats; Davida Kellogg graduated from Barnard and earned her Master’s and PhD from Columbia—she has been an ROTC instructor and is considered a preeminent authority on military ethics. Concluding the speaker presentation portion of the forum will be Sean Wilkes, chairman of Advocates for Columbia ROTC—and a member of the Senate Task Force.

I would like to clear up some persistent myths about ROTC and the non-discrimination policy. First, there is the myth that ROTC would necessitate suspending the University’s non-discrimination policy. That’s simply untrue. Columbia already hosts arrangements, like Barnard, which it couldn’t under a strictest interpretation of the non-discrimination policy—not to discriminate, but for the greater good of diversity and inclusion. Similarly, there is no reason for Columbia to suspend its non-discrimination policy because of ROTC. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (or DADT) applies only to uniformed military personnel. In fact, non-military openly gay employees and students could work in the ROTC office. Columbia would not—by far—be the first university which enforced its non-discrimination policy while hosting an ROTC program. There are many ways to structure the arrangement, which I won’t get into here. That’s for smarter minds than mine.

The second myth is that DADT makes ROTC illegal under New York anti-discrimination laws. Unfortunately, whatever we think of the law (and I believe it needs to change—there are too many good soldiers who bear its unfair burden) DADT is a federal law, which falls under the “Supremacy Clause” – Article Six of the Constitution. The question of ROTC and our non-discrimination policy is not one of legality—of invalidating an important policy, or of supporting a poorly rendered law. The question is how best to advance civil responsibility, diversity, inclusion, engagement and reform, both in our Columbia community, and as Columbia looks outward—with its special responsibilities—into society and the world.

To many, the ROTC debate has been framed as a vote for or against the non-discrimination policy. We need to support both the non-discrimination policy and ROTC. Many people have asked me, What is my founding motivation for starting the ROTC movement on campus? There are many good reasons for ROTC to return to Columbia, but this is the belief in which it began: I believe in soldiers—and that includes gay soldiers. This is for them, too. If we choose against ROTC, we unambiguously choose against closing the civil-military gap, and we choose for segregation and a sanction of anti-military discrimination in our community—our flagship institution. No reform, no normalization of values in our society, can happen in that injured state.

In closing my introduction, I leave you with this thought: At this crossroads in our history, we must choose: Are we an Ivory Tower disconnected from the needs of society, divorced from nation and people, and only good for insular thinking and selfish pursuits? Or, are we truly America’s producer of vanguard leaders who pursue integration, diversity, the greater good and the improvement of all parts of our society, including the military?

The challenge of our time demands the best leaders from our generation. As Dr. Martin Luther King said in another time of pressing need in American history,

“Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.”

At Columbia, it is again time to stand with a greater determination, for the sake of our people, our country and our world. If our government has been wrong by discouraging gays from serving in the military—and I believe it has been—then let us show America the right way. Allow Columbia to teach our government and the American people a higher standard of diversity and inclusion by embracing ROTC and our civic duties. Set us free so we can lead the way.

The decision we make for the restoration of ROTC is about more than just ROTC. We are shaping our generation’s vision of Columbia University and, thus, our value to society. Thank you, and I pass the floor to Professor Applegate.

[Note: The beginning of Prof. Applegate’s speech was not recorded.]

JAMES APPLEGATE: . . . . [Columbia must retain the authority to determine titles for] ROTC instructors, who will be given titles that are appropriate to their level of education, accomplishment, and professional experience just as anybody else is here. Columbia takes titles very seriously, and we must insist that these titles would be appropriate for the instructors as judged by Columbia’s criteria.

Many of the arguments against ROTC are based on non-discrimination policy and DADT. It should be made clear at this point that there were ten people on the Task Force on ROTC. Not a single person on that Task Force supported the policy of DADT. All felt that it was bad policy for the United States and fundamentally wrong in a very deep way.

Where we disagreed was on what to do about it. There was not a disagreement on the issues of morality or issues of principle. The disagreement is on the issues of strategy and the issues of tactics. Those who voted against the return of ROTC as soon as practical and subject to certain preconditions argued that the appropriate response of the University to a policy which the community views as discriminatory is for us to shun the military until such time as this policy is changed. Those of us who voted in favor of the return of ROTC under current conditions argued that the single most effective and by far the most powerful agent of change that this institution could provide were Columbia- educated leaders in today’s and tomorrow’s military.

This is not a choice of, Do you want DADT or do you want the military? The people who voted in favor of ROTC oppose DADT and oppose it unanimously. There are those who said that for Columbia to host an ROTC program amounts to an institutional endorsement of DADT. We felt that that was just simply wrong. The institution should not, does not and should not, I think, use its affiliations as vehicles for expressing political opinions, endorsements or condemnations.

As an example, we accept and welcome students and scholars from all across the world, regardless of the form of government, foreign policy, or human rights records of the nation of origin of these individuals. There are those who would say that Columbia’s hosting of an ROTC program amounts to something like the University’s endorsement of the war in Iraq. This is also not true. I believe that one of the fundamental lessons that the United States, or Americans collectively, should learn from our experience in Vietnam [is] that it is a tragic mistake to confuse the military and support for the military as support for the uses for which the military is put by its civilian leaders. Those who would argue again that support for the ROTC is support for the Iraq war I think have just simply failed to realize, failed to understand this important lesson.

And also people would say that this would politicize the University. This is actually something that I think is probably true, but it is a development that I do not fear, [that] I actually embrace and welcome. I cannot imagine a more appropriate thing to happen on a university campus [than] to have a vigorous and ongoing debate about the appropriate role of the military in a democratic society, the appropriate role of the military in the academy, the obligations and responsibilities of the citizen to the democratic state and of that state to the citizen. So I think in conclusion this is actually to be welcomed.

In conclusion I would just say that the choice here is welcoming the military with its warts and everything else back, or shunning it and claiming that we only want it back when somehow we think it’s good enough for us. Shunning the military is a choice that a private university is free to make. It is not the choice that Americans collectively are free to make. It is a choice I believe that Columbia should not make, and I think it’s time to welcome ROTC back to our campus. Thank you.

LEWIS COLE. So it seems to me that there are two kinds of arguments that have been advanced in terms of ROTC’s return to campus.

CHEN: Oh, actually, first your name.

COLE: I’m sorry. Lewis Cole. I’m Professor Lewis Cole. Lewis Cole, and I’m a professor here of screenwriting at the School of the Arts, and I was here as a student from ’64 to 1968, and I was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society, and I was very involved in the strike. It’s a matter of historical fact that actually ROTC was not a primary concern of the strike back then, but it became one of the things which the University administration actually got in on later on after the strike was over.

It seems—and that touches upon the issue of the politicization of the campus, which I want to get into later on—it seems to me that there are two basic kinds of arguments that are used to support ROTC’s return to campus. One is an argument which argues for ROTC on its own terms. That is that there [are] particular virtues in this organization and what it stands for, etc., that need to be applauded and which the University should embrace.

The second argument, which you hear variations of, is a conditional argument which goes something to the effect of, Well, the army may not be such a great thing, ROTC may not be such a great thing, but we should get ourselves involved in it for a variety of reasons. And those reasons can differ.

One of my colleagues on the panel is, I think, going to make the argument, which I think is a very interesting and important argument, that because the army is not a conscription army now, because it is fundamentally an elite or an army of volunteers, that it is more important to get involved with ROTC and the army whatever you think about it. Another argument which I’ve heard advanced was, Yes, DADT is terrible, and it’s because it is terrible that we should embrace it, because that will allow us to argue against it.

These arguments seem to me basically without merit. They seem to me without merit for two reasons. One is that, historically, change in the armed forces has only come at an almost glacial rate. It is 100 years that it took the armed forces to become an integrated institution in the society, and to this day, though 33 percent of the armed forces are people of color, the amount of officers is 17 percent, which speaks to some kind of institutional bias that is still there. This is after the Civil War, after the Second World War, etc.

It’s also true that when you don’t have an army that is conscripted, so that it has a really democratically selected population, the degree to which the army changes is even more slow, and that’s been reflected in the last 20 or 30 years with the change in the makeup of the armed forces politically, etc. It’s interesting to me, for example, that on the one hand it is said, Well, it’s good to politicize the campus, [and] this is not a partisan issue; and on the other hand, that we are here tonight under the sponsorship of a Republican organization.

There is, in fact, a relationship between supporting the army’s presence on campus and, whether or not you want this to be the case, the uses to which the army is put. And I think it is, I think it is simply chimerical to believe that we’re going to have an organization on campus which is part of the army and those issues will not be raised.

The second thing about the argument, and the conditional argument, which I think makes it without merit, is that I disagree with the Republican Party. I think the present policies of the Republican Party are disastrous for this society. That does not mean that I should become a member of the Republican Party. I vote against the Republican Party.

If you believe that DADT is a disastrous policy, there is no necessity to say that therefore you should work with those who are part of it. You can make an equally strong argument that you are going to get a better result from absenting yourself from it. Let me give a small example of that. I offered, I volunteered to come here because I felt that anti-ROTC voices here were underrepresented. Eric very gracefully accepted, you know, when I asked him whether or not I could come, and this morning he sent me some e-mails about what the format was. And one of the parts of the format was going to be that there were going to be written questions from the audience. Now I have participated in probably 100 forums, and never in my life have I been in a forum in which the audience was not going to be able to participate directly from the floor.

So I said to Eric, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think you should have direct questions and answers from the floor. He said, No, he thought that the people who organized this felt it was more efficient. I said, I don’t think it’s a question of efficiency; I think it’s a question of control. He said, Well, why don’t you go through the questions with me? I said no. It was on him if he had come up with this policy to make sure that the questions were balanced, etc. I did not want to participate in a decision that I thought was wrong.

So similarly, I think that a lot of the conditional arguments which I think you’re going to hear tonight are wrong, and they are tactically wrong, and that it is very hard to give examples of where those tactics actually have worked. Now I’m going to jump over a number of the arguments that there are, I think. for why it is that ROTC should not be on campus. But let me make a broad argument. The argument for ROTC ultimately is an argument for privilege. It is saying that service in the armed forces is somehow different from and therefore can claim different privileges in the University than any other forms of civic activity.

I believe that to be fundamentally false. Yes, any society needs to defend itself. The society also needs health care. The society also needs spiritual guidance. A society also needs many kinds of contributions from its citizens that make it be the society that it is. I was prepared to go to Vietnam and I would have ended up in jail. I was lucky. I had a physical disability, and so I didn’t do it. But I served, I feel, in another army back then. I served against the war. I fought against the war. I went to jail because I was against the war. I had a degree that was withheld from me for seven years by this university because of what it was that I did—I’m not arguing rightly or wrongly. I don’t get credit for that. I don’t believe I deserve credit for that. That is what I believed in as a person and as a citizen of this country, and if other people believe differently, that’s their right and that’s what they should do. But the University should not be party to it because you cannot begin to divide it. If you give people that privileged position, then you are going to have to come up with answers as to why other people don’t also deserve those privileges. And you are making a political statement at that point. And in doing that you are breaking the basic social contract that rules the University, which is not in isolation, but it is rather saying this place does something special in the society and we need special rules that allow us to do it.

CHEN: Professor Silver.

ALLAN SILVER: Yes, I am Allan Silver. I am in the Department of Sociology, and Lewis Cole and I both came to Columbia the very same year.

COLE: Did we? But we were of different status. The cunning of history. . . .

SILVER: The cunning of history—yes, our destinies are intertwined. And we meet again. Lewis came as a student. I came as an eager, new junior faculty person.

Now military institutions are a central feature of the American polity, and they will continue to be so for the indefinite future. That’s a sharp change from the normal rhythm of the American past. We’re in a new phase of American history. Sixty years since the Second World War, and fifteen since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a few years since the attacks on Manhattan and Washington announce that. They put urgent questions for public debate, but the question of ROTC bears on us in terms that are specific to this university and to others like it. There’s a very long-term and growing democratic deficit of constitutional scope in how America deals with war and peace.

And among those problems, far from the only one, but the one that we deal with this evening, is what I will call the essential absence of socially advanced groups and the institutions of higher learning that they attend—their absence from the military aspect of democratic citizenship. Of the Congress that authorized the war in Iraq, very few have sons and daughters in active service—by one count, three. And many high in the current and the previous administrations, whether they opposed or supported the Vietnam War, avoided military service by one measn or another.

I, of course, was a faculty member here during the 1960s, and I well recall the protests against the Vietnam War, which in my opinion are justified and animated by many sources. A protest against it arose and fell in part in response to the possibility of being drafted. Conscription is indeed a policy of the past, and with it, the widespread obligation of citizens to share in the risks and the consequences of military endeavors. And this poses a very serious issue for the legitimacy and civic health of American democracy.

Should Columbia take the same posture towards military service as do privileged elites and their institutions broadly? That is to say, take a free ride while cheering or deploring from a distance. Or will we enter into an educational relationship with the profession of arms as we do with other professions? There have been, and I’m sure there will be, good wars and bad wars. But Columbia must decide on whether ROTC properly forms part of its educational purposes in this phase of American history, during this or any other administration, or this or any other Congress, or this or any other foreign and strategic policy, during a bad war or during a good war.

Now some reasons for favoring ROTC have merit, and those reasons I know are endorsed and advocated by many of my colleagues here, but in my opinion they’re not decisive. For example, that ROTC increases scholarships for needy and other students. But in accepting ROTC for financial reasons, we risk a kind of a soft militarization. Many disfavored groups successfully use military service to improve their positions in society, but that is not a compelling reason. It’s not a compelling educational reason to restore ROTC.

No university is required to provide all forms of training. It’s true that ROTC would increase diversity, and I also look forward to that. But diversity, one of the more abused words of our vocabulary, is not a magic word that ritually exempts policies and priorities from examination.

Some reasons for rejecting ROTC also have merit, but they are not controlling. There is a persistent myth that the military grossly exploits the poor and disadvantaged who bear a disproportionate share of war’s risks, and that ROTC as part of this unjust pattern must therefore be rejected. This idea of course is animated by the profound American ideal of equality of opportunity. It is nourished by memories of the last good war, when America mobilized over ten million with minimum regard to such social experiments. It is nurtured by a clashing memory of the 1960s. Some of those memories are accurate, others are not accurate, but all are now mythological.

But like most paths in life, a military service is a mix of constraint and choice. Yes, the enlisted ranks are tilted down in terms of social class, but they roughly resemble the profile of comparable occupational skills in the civilian labor force, which the military’s occupational structure increasingly resembles.

The military is quite selective from the general population. It is elites who select themselves out of the military. In fiscal year 2002, which is the last date for which data is available, the proportions of blacks were beginning to approach their proportion in the total population. Ten percent of officers are black. And there is no institution in civil society in which blacks command whites to the extent that they do in the military. It is also a myth—and I’ll be happy to match footprints on this—that military casualties disproportionately bear on minority or disfavored groups.

Changes in military policies involving personnel come from the top down, from civilian authority, and they come quite dramatically. The classic instance is President Truman’s order of ’48 to racially integrate the armed forces despite the military’s resistance, but in two years his order was speedily administered. With the coming of the Korean War, racial segregation basically vanished. Expansion of military roles for women has followed a similarly abrupt course after the end of the draft in 1973. This reveals how can Columbia in reacting to the ROTC question best further the cause of expanding civic respect in American society. Rejecting an ROTC program because of the current policy ignores a history that extends for six decades, a military service that played key symbolic and substantive roles in struggles for equal citizenship and civic dignity, but these struggles must be fought from within as well as from without.

One half of Native Americans were not eligible for formal citizenship before their exemplary service in World War I. A Japanese-American both accepted conscription and volunteered even as their government imprisoned their families. African-Americans did not wait outside the lunch counters of the segregated South or shrink from voting until desegregation and civil rights bills were passed. They went in.

MICHAEL ADLER: Since you’re going over your time limit, you might ask someone to give you extra time.

SILVER: May I have about two minutes?

CHEN: Two minutes.

SILVER: Hispanics and women and blacks continue to have multiple problems. Homosexuals have distinctive problems, but the struggle for equal citizenship and civic dignity runs through all these experiences. Columbia should not stand in the way of the students who wish to serve though ROTC in spite of and because of these struggles.

An ROTC program at Columbia does not signify the University’s militarization. That idea stems most recently from the 1960s. In 1966 I started the struggle against reporting grade point averages to draft boards—can any problem be more remote from the present? In 1969 I opposed NROTC because the program had egregious obstacles to becoming a proper part of the University. But the priorities, policies, and passions of that time are a warning and not a guide to our present and our future.

We have a choice. Columbia University is the site of one of the great upheavals of the 1960s and therefore all the more symbolically well placed to make a notable contribution indistinguishably educational and civic to this country.

COLE: It was my understanding it was ten minutes for each—

CHEN: Yeah, it is.

COLE: Yeah. And so I didn’t think that actually Allan went over. On my clock he was actually pretty much on time.

CHEN: That should come from the chair, not the audience.

Mr. Brozak.

STEVE BROZAK: My name is Steve Brozak. I graduated from GS in 1982 and from the executive MBA program in 1994. If you would indulge me, how many senators do we have in the audience? Show of hands. Okay. I very much want to thank you for being here. Whether you’re advocates of ROTC or you’re against, the only way we can get a real idea of what the issues are is literally by having exchanges like this, and by going out there and trying to dispel some impressions that may or may not be true.

I’m bookended by two professors that happened to be at Columbia in the ‘60s. I was also at Columbia in the ‘60s. As a matter of fact, I was in the stacks at Butler at the same time that they were teaching and going to school here. My dad was doing his dissertation, and he parked me there along with my sister, and we got more than an eyeful watching what was going on. So I can say I was raised at Columbia in addition to having two degrees from the place.

The first impression I’d like to dispel here is that—I just finished running for Congress on the Democratic ticket. I spoke at the Democratic convention advocating for John Kerry. I was endorsed by the human rights campaign. They sent as many people as we were legally allowed to accept to advocate for gay and lesbian and transgender rights. They singled me out to go out there and be their champion in talking about advancing equality. So if anyone wants to go out there and say that I discriminated against anyone then, you know, basically they’re not paying attention to the facts.

As far as the University is concerned, I hold this place with just as much of a special position in my heart as these two gentlemen that spoke just before, but I also spent 22 years on active duty in the reserves and then back on active duty in the Marine Corps. I left Columbia University and went directly into the Marine Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant and spent about three and a half years as an infantry officer in most of Asia.

I would find one point wrong with the first speaker in that this is not a Republican, this is not a Democratic issue. This is an issue about vision. This is an issue that talks about what the University and what America needs into the 21^st century. I would also take issue with the speaker just before. There are no good wars. There are wars that are avoidable, and there are wars that are unavoidable. There are wars that will change what we view as society, and there are wars, frankly, we can do better by avoiding—period.

I have a memento here from my active duty and reserve days. Basically it’s the ribbons and medals that I was awarded for going to places like peacekeeping missions in Haiti, going to places like peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, and yes, for going to Iraq. The people that I served with over 22 years, they were individuals. I suspect that if I was to get a show of hands here about how many people knew people that were in the military, I’d see very few. The people that are serving today are no different than you or I. They represent a cross section of American society. Most of the time they have no opinions that are different from the ones that you and I share. The difference is unfortunately that a lot of leadership in this country. I was a strong opponent of and am a strong opponent of the Bush administration. They can’t voice their opinion the same way you or I can. That’s where they need your help. That’s where they need for you to be their voices.

If there is a problem with DADT, and I’m sure everyone in this room will agree that there is, you have to be the agents of change for them. How can you do that? Well, right off the bat, how many people here have enough experience with the military to understand how to get change? How many people understand that when you’re talking about top-down enforcement of rules, the rules are not made by the generals or the admirals? The rules are made by staffs employed by the generals, the admirals and the secretaries of defense. Those staffs are comprised of captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and sometimes generals too. They draw from their experience. They draw from a myriad of backgrounds. They bring to them whatever educational values that were instilled in them when they started. Their eloquence, their ability to win that conversation, determines whether or not that admiral, that general, that secretary of defense is going to go out there and advocate one point over another.

DADT is a monument to the fact that there were not enough people there that could advocate eloquently enough to say that we should not have discrimination in today’s military. I’ve spoken about my credentials. What does returning ROTC mean to Columbia and what does the return of ROTC for Columbia mean to this country? September 15, 2003, I was one of the designated authors for something that the Department of Defense requires every ten years. It’s a review of the all-volunteer force. Basically it says whether or not we’re doing a good job, what we need to improve. There were about twenty authors at the initial printing. There are nineteen authors in the final review. They saw fit to eliminate what I had to say.

What I had to say basically said that the course we were on, the military, was not a tenable one, that we would run out of troops given the sustained level of troop rotation involvement and guard use. They didn’t want to pay attention to facts. They didn’t want to go out there and understand that, Guess what, we have an issue in what’s going on in today’s military. I’d like to think that if we had more Columbia, more Ivy, more officers, more men and women could go out there and talk about what we needed to do, that we would have approached Iraq and Afghanistan with a different outlook, with a real plan.

Now, that’s the document that was published six months ago. This comes from the front page of the New York Times today. “Blooded Marines sound off about lack of armor and men.” The realities are that we are running out of people. The realities are that lack of planning, lack of equipment is costing us a great deal. Columbia University can fill that breach. They can assist by going out there and saying that we are loyal, we believe that we can do things differently. We can advocate for. . . .

The co-chair of this committee talked about Columbia as an oasis. If you go out there and be a paragon of virtue, that oasis cannot sustain itself. That oasis needs to go out there and ensure that we are a voice that can challenge what is wrong. By just choosing to ignore the realities that are taking place, we aid no one. As a matter of fact, we aid the critics that basically go out there and say that, Well, these people aren’t even involved in the discussion, why should we heed what they say?

The unit that’s described here [in the New York Times] I joined twenty years ago: Echo Company, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines. The company commanders of these units are being relieved because they’re going out there and they’re advocating for their men.

I don’t disagree that military service isn’t the only service to this country. I served with many men and women that had joined the Peace Corps before joining the Marine Corps. On peacekeeping operations I served with many non-governmental organizations where people had suffered, where people had gone out there and tried to make a difference. But unfortunately today I don’t see that same spirit of service at Columbia University. I don’t see the people going out there and trying to make a difference. I don’t see people understanding what the issues are.

By returning ROTC to Columbia we’ll now start to engage what the issues are. The people that join ROTC will be able to start that discussion, and the professors, the University members here will be able to talk about what they think should be changed. This will be news.

I started by talking about vision. What does vision mean? I’ll end with three anecdotes. About two and a half years ago on the front page of the New York Post one of the eminent realtors in New York decided that he was not going to let anyone that was in the military sign a lease for one of these luxury buildings that he owned. Blatant discrimination. Against the law. Bottom line, he could care less. Here was a fellow that had made a ton of money understanding about the democracy, understanding about how to get around the system, but he didn’t understand that there was a vision required to support that democracy, to participate in it.

Not too long after that I remember going to award the mayor, I’m sorry the governor of the state of New Jersey, with an award for having assisted the Guardsmen and Reservists who were called back. We wanted to have it engraved, went to a local jeweler, and when I mean local, literally about ten miles from here, and I said, could you engrave this? Well, his response was, Well, I don’t know if it’s worth my time, and if it is, bottom line it will cost you more than it’s really worth. I explained to him that the Department of Defense protects us all. It isn’t worth their time? It isn’t worth their effort? we’re literally within ten miles of where the World Trade Center stood. But it behooves us as Americans to understand that we have to participate. He immediately said, I’ll engrave it for you and I won’t charge you anything. I think he represents most Americans that understand after it being pointed out what needs to be done to safeguard this democracy.

The last person I’ll talk to you about is a public employee of a municipality out in Utah. He was a Guardsman that was called back to active duty for Afghanistan. Literally one day he’s working in a park, the next day he’s in Afghanistan fighting for his life. He’s involved in a firefight with the Taliban, his unit is attacked, and he’s knocked down. A grenade throws him off balance. He goes and picks himself up to try and safeguard the other unit members, brings them to the safety of a small alcove. Unfortunately this time he’s knocked down by another grenade. He literally loses the left side of his face, one eye’s gone. He doesn’t wake up for about a week. When he does, he wakes up in Rangstein, and the first thing he wants to know is whether the people that he had tried to safeguard, that he had tried to protect, were okay. There is a man that basically lost the sight of one eye, yet he had the vision to understand that sometimes we have to participate in safeguarding this democracy.

I would like very much for Columbia University to have that vision so that we can restore our version of ROTC to this country to go out there and safeguard this democracy. Thank you very much.

CHEN: Mr. Hwong.

TAYLOR HWONG: My name is Taylor Hwong, and I’m a current student at the Business School right now, and I also graduated from the Engineering School in 1992 with a degree in mining engineering, and I had done ROTC when I was an undergraduate here, and I served on active duty for a total of about six years, and I have been a management consultant for about two as well, and now I’m back here. And at the risk of dumbing down the conversation a bit, I mostly wanted to relate some of my experiences because a lot of my friends both from high school, from college, from work, they often come to me for stories about the military because I’ve discovered that very, very few of them do have any personal contact or personal experiences of their own, as the other speakers alluded to. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about what I did, and then tell you some of the [inaudible] that I got out of the military and why I thought it was such a powerful combination of experiences to be a veteran and to be a Columbia graduate at the same time.

For better or for worse, I did not get myself into any of the horrible firefights like the one that Mr. Brozak just described. I did start as a platoon leader in the First Infantry Division as a combat engineer, and I did that for about two years, and it was an incredible management experience. I had a platoon, I had lives at stake. Even if I wasn’t in battle, we were always doing dangerous training exercises, working with explosives. When you blow something up, you better believe you want to make sure that that soldier has taken all the right training measures and safety precautions. And these force you to mature quickly and understand what it means to take care of people, your employees. I did that for about two years, and then I went off to the Middle East, to Qatar to serve as a construction project manager. I transferred into the Corps of Engineers, and I was in charge of getting some very large construction projects built there. I had to give a lot of briefings, I had to write a lot of papers while I was there, I had to review a lot of technical documents. I got to meet a lot of foreign government employees. I got to meet a lot of State Department employees. I got to meet a lot of local people in Qatar and across the Middle East as I traveled around there.

And then I went, that was about 2000, I got out of the military. I had done my four and a half years, in case you’re counting years, I went to grad school first after I graduated from Columbia and got an engineering graduate degree. And then I was in the military. I finished in Qatar. I went into management consulting for two years. And one of the things that I discovered there was that—management consulting, some of you might know, is—a lot of people think it’s extremely different from the management style in the military. In the military you think hierarchy, following orders all the time, and in management consulting you think small teams, everybody collaborating, and to some extent that’s true, but there’s an awful lot of overlap. And I found that it really helped to have been in the military because in the military I still had to build consensus, I had to influence people, I couldn’t just order people around, can’t get anything done that way, I had to reach out to people who I had never spoken to and get them to do things for me, and get them to understand what I was trying to do for them, in writing, verbally. All of this translated very well into my management consulting career.

And then after two years I went back into the military, I voluntarily went back in in 2003 and I served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And not by deliberate plan, but I ended up in Afghanistan working very closely with US Aid on building the Ringroad, this highway from Kandahar to Kabul, and I had to work very closely with the mission director from US Aid. And without trying to be boastful, I feel like one of the reasons I was selected for that assignment once I was there was because they recognized that I have the engineering experience, but they also wanted somebody who could effectively communicate, who knew how to handle the relationship with the mission director inasmuch as that they saw my experience from Qatar dealing with the embassy and other government customers.

And those made it very rewarding and intellectually challenging. So that was one thing that I took away. That it wasn’t just running around with a gun shooting or following orders. It’s a lot more complex. There’s a lot of different levels of management and a lot of different experiences that are out there.

The other part that I took away that I alluded to before was that—becaise one of the arguments that I heard about ROTC not coming back is that, well, students do have the opportunity to develop themselves with ROTC off campus. It’s true. And that’s what I had to do. I went to John Jay College of Criminal Justice and participated through the Fordham program while I was there. I did that for four years, every week of the school year. But I think we also discourage a lot of students from coming here who would be interested in serving in the military by doing that. It is an option, but I believe we are robbing ourselves of a certain diversity of student who wants to serve their nation in that way. And I also feel that having had the Columbia education that I was well qualified to serve my duties. I’m not going to get on my Ivory Tower and say that I’m better than everybody else intellectually, but a lot of the challenges that I had were intellectual challenges, not just physical challenges, not just managerial challenges.

And so for these reasons I feel that it’s especially a good reason for the students here to want to have that opportunity on campus. It was a wonderful experience for me. I think it could therefore be a wonderful experience for other students here who want to serve in the military, who want to serve the nation in that regard, to take on positions of leadership. And if it’s good for the students, it should also be good for the University, and it’s also good for the country in that regard.

And so that’s my pitch for why I feel very strongly that ROTC should have a place back here on campus. For anybody who’s interested in the reality of what it’s like to be in the military these days, during the Q&A I’d be more than happy to answer any questions.

CHEN: Mr. Stewart.

SCOTT STEWART: How’s it going? My name is Scott Stewart. I’m a General Studies student, 2007. I think the main reason I was asked here is because of—not that I have all the answers because I don’t. I’m not actually here to even sway anyone in one particular direction or the other. But I am gay, and I don’t know how to do hair and that kind of stuff.

I served in the infantry. I joined for a particular reason—because after DADT was initiated, I felt strongly against it and so I joined the United States Army to oppose that ruling. That’s why I chose the infantry, because that was the hardest part of the branch. I know that some people might differ about that. And so, and I don’t have anything prepared because I just walked away from writing a ten-page paper so my mind’s kind of way over there as well. So I’ll be available to explain more in the Q and A.

One thing that keeps popping up in my head is that saying that no battle was ever won that wasn’t fought. And I feel that we have an obligation, not as Columbians or, you know, just not being from Columbia but actually being Americans, individuals, that we have an obligation to get rid of this discrimination, overt discrimination in the military. The only way that’s in my mind to do that is to actually face it head on. It’s like when we were kids and we had a cough and our moms gave us or our dads gave us those cough medicine and it really sucked. You know, it tasted horrible. It’s one of those things we had to do. We had to face this thing head on. If we ignore it, I’m afraid of the consequences.

You know, a lot of black civil rights leaders today don’t like homosexuals comparing our struggle with their struggle, but I see this, my joining the army, as my opportunity to walk up to that whites-only drinking fountain and drinking from it. And that I think that we should all share in that. We shouldn’t just sit in the back of the bus or not sit at the front counter. That we have to participate in this thing. If only for the same reason I did, I didn’t have any other reason to go in but to oppose this policy. I was completely open in the military, and I served honorably and did my job I think better than most. And that paid off. It changed a lot of people’s minds, at least in the United States Army. There weren’t any instances where any discrimination was put towards you because I guess I didn’t give them an opportunity to do that. I showed them that I was a soldier, an individual human.

I don’t have much more to say. As I said, I’m not prepared, but I’ll be glad to answer questions that anyone asks. And I’m also under 10 minutes. You should be proud about that.

CHEN: We are very thankful. Professor Kellogg?.

DAVIDA KELLOGG: My name is Davida Kellogg. I am Barnard ’67 and Graduate School Columbia ’69, ’73. I think the reason that I’m here is that I’m also a military history fellow from West Point 1992, and since ’93 I had for many years taught, I think what’s relevant here is that I taught both military history and military ethics for Army ROTC on a large state campus in New England.

There’s much said about something called the civilian-military gap. We’ve heard today, and that gap is very much in evidence here. Basically to describe it, we’re saying that very few people on this campus really know much about the military, the American military, or about American soldiers. We’ve lost track of that. We’ve lost contact with them. And this is my main reason for being here, because I feel that that is very, very dangerous to American society, and also to our ideas of democracy.

There are two things. One of the things that shows me that the gap is really large here is, in keeping track of this debate on line and so on, many statements were made which did not resemble the soldiers that I have come to know. I’ve also spent a great deal of time working on an oral history of Vietnam vets, a very long and painful one. And some of the things that are said—that an ROTC on campus would militarize the campus, for instance, that some students would find themselves unsafe in that atmosphere, and so on—are evidence that you know little about soldiers of our country. And you know little about our military.

One of the things you should know is that our military is heir to two great traditions. And the first is the “just war” tradition. It goes all the way back essentially to Aristotle, if you don’t want to go back to Biblical times. Aristotle’s the one who coined the term “just war.” Essentially it is the remedy when all else fails for peace, and there can be such a thing. There is not this clear black and white dichotomy between just peace and unjust war. We had unjust peace in this country prior to the Civil War, a very unjust peace. And unfortunately the remedy to that had to be a very long painful war.

Now just war has two parts to it. They’re known as Jus Ad Bellem, which means justice in declaring war, in going to war in the first place, and this is the province of the state. It is not the soldier’s province, except that he is a citizen and he may cast his vote as any other citizen does. But it is the province of the state. And that includes a whole bunch of things like just authority and so on, which we won’t go into here, but—

The thing that concerns the soldier is the second part of the just war tradition and that is called Jus In Bello—justice in prosecuting a war, and that concerns him very, very much. And this is where people like me come in. This is what our teaching is benched towards.

The other thing that shapes our American soldiers is quintessentially American tradition of civilian control of the military. This was put in place by George Washington, our first commander in chief and our first president, before we were even a country. And it is really the only way in which we could have a standing army and still have the kinds of freedoms that we went to war with Britain in the first place over. It was something that is really quintessentially American. Nothing else fits with our particular personality, our freedom living, our liberty loving, the kind of a country that declared that it had a right to pursue happiness, an unheard-of thing, absolutely unheard of thing in the 18^th century.

At any rate, there’s a constitutional right to civilian control of the military. It is ours, we control it. There’s also a corresponding requirement, a corresponding onus on us, and it is a heavy one—that we know what we’re doing. And here is where we get in trouble—when we marginalize soldiers, when we marginalize the military. I have actually, if you want to look at what is happening to ROTC units on campuses in this United States, I have a brochure that says where they are, and I’m going to read you a few places: Florida A&M, University of Florida, Jacksonville University, Georgia Institute of Technology—you can get the picture there. Essentially what is happening in this country is that the weight of ROTC, the preponderance of ROTC units is, it’s slumping south on this country like a watermelon or middle-aged lady. It’s slumping into the red states, which is something, I think, that concerns a lot of us here. And it’s not to say that there’s—that this is an evil thing or something like that, but that they’re simply welcomed there. The reason they’re going there is because they’re welcomed there.

Now if you want to control the military, we can do it in several ways. We can do it long range the way we’re doing it here. You know we can go out and vote every four years for the guy who’s going to be the commander in chief, or we can do it up close and personal. We can work with the students. We can create the kinds of officers that embody the virtues that we want in our soldiers. And the very thought that, you know, soldiers on this campus would be some kind of jack-booted thug, well, I have been in countries. I’ve been in Hungary in 1980 where Russian soldiers patrolled the streets of Budapest, and they were jack booted, and they did carry loaded rifles, and they were in control of civilians. I’ve been in Chile later on while Pinochet was still in charge there, where on one of the biggest shopping nights before Christmas a firefight essentially broke out, machine gun fire under our hotel window in the center of Santiago in Chile.

We do not have that kind of army in this country. We have an army that is responsible to us. Now it takes, as we’re saying, more than a teaspoon of brights to do this. It takes education, and we’re very, very poor by and large in this country in doing this, in fulfilling this particular responsibility. We should start with our children in their civics classes in fourth and fifth grades not to teach, not to inculcate them in one kind of political idea or another, but to the knowledge that they have to know what is going on. They have to understand what is going on politically, sociologically. What is going on in the world, and what their soldiers are and what they’re for. And we don’t do that, and we don’t do that here.

And this university, I mean, the young people in this audience—look at each other. Just look at the one next to you—you people with your elite

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE; BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

KELLOGG: –Ivy education. You are princes and princesses of the realm. You are going to be the movers and shakers here. And often, because the world is not the best of all possible worlds, what has to be used to move and shake the world, to get a just peace eventually, are armies. You need to know what you’re doing because when you don’t, people die.

So I just want to talk about the fact that in the army when you join, even in an all-volunteer army, nobody joins without giving up some part of their civilian rights. The minute you join, the minute you raise your hand and take your oath of office, you come under what’s called the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice]. It’s a much harsher code of justice than civilian justice. There are particular provisions for punishment for things like conduct unbecoming an officer. The reason there are such things is because you are responsible to the people of the United States. It’s a very mistrustful legacy we have. Washington almost didn’t get a standing army at all. We had people like Sam Adams, not the prettied-up Sam Adams on the beer bottle, but the big old, big-headed, ugly, dyspeptic Sam Adams who said that militaries were dangerous and they would have to be watched with a jealous eye. That jealous eye is yours. You need to be able to do this.

Now, ROTC on campus is the closest thing you’re ever going to become to have control of what happens in the military. It is not the intrusion of the military to campus. It is your best chance to affect the military by the campus. And I just want to say that I’ve heard things like, Elites don’t select themselves into the army. I’ve worked to make good soldiers for a long time, and what I find is that elites do select themselves into ROTC. These are elites in character, elites in academics, elites in athletics. I’ve worked with these people. It’s been my privilege, my privilege to have them there.

And when you worry about—you have to look at the whole number of controlling acts and documents and laws that govern the military, and they’re very, very tight. Some of the things you see as repressive are actually ways of guaranteeing civilian control. So among other things, a soldier is always under military law, whether he is in uniform or not. Soldiers, you can actually be prosecuted for things that one would never think of prosecuting someone for in civilian society. Adultery is actionable, because we want the best people we can have, not the worst.

Well, was it you who were telling me? Somebody was saying something about a Chinese general who had said that you want the worst people you have in the military because they’re expendable. This is not the American way of war. Ours is to put the best ones in. And especially now in a time of more and more political warfare, we want the people who can live up to our contractual duties under international law, and they are not easy. We want people who can fight an enemy that is essentially without honor. We want them to be able to fight honorably. It is not easy. They have to be trained that way. They have to know what they’re doing. Every single young officer is a teacher of these things to the men he works with. Every single one of them is.

Lastly there’s a little thing called the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military in order--we’re worried about this Praetorian Guard type thing. It prohibits sects or that sort of thing. There are very few cases in which the military can be used in police actions within the United States. One of these exceptions, of course, is the Coast Guard, which has law enforcement duties in drug operations and things of that sort. It’s a very interesting act, because it is a [inaudible] around that non-politicization of soldiers. That’s the thing. Soldiers may not be political for as long as they wear the uniform. You may not stand for office. You may not campaign. Soldiers are the least ones, and the reason is that they have to serve everybody, not just those whose political leanings they may also share. And soldiers that I’ve come to know are all over the spectrum when it comes to political views.

Some of our most famous officers have taken this so seriously. George [inaudible] was famed for not even voting as long as he wore the uniform. I think the first time he voted was after he retired.

At any rate, I hope that when the questioning comes around, if you do have questions about these issues, perhaps we can start demystifying it a little bit. I can maybe help you out a little bit because I do have recent experience with this. Thank you.

CHEN: Before Sean closes the speaker portion, I have a few comments. We are actually making pretty good time considering we started about fifteen minutes late. And a recording of this event is available upon request for you media types in the audience. I think if I saw correctly, there are refreshments. We have drinks and refreshments after this event if you’d like. As far as the question- answer phase after Sean’s speech, considering there aren’t too many people in here, I think we can be a little bit liberal as far as the restrictions on what we want to say and if you have a few comments that you want to throw in as well, I think we can facilitate a pretty good discussion. And finally, Mr. Wilkes, you have the floor.

SEAN WILKES: For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sean Wilkes. I am the chairman of Advocates for Columbia ROTC and the founder. And I’ve been involved with this since my freshman year, since the beginning. I’m a junior now, just finishing up. And there are a number of reasons why this issue is important to me and why I got so heavily involved with it in the beginning.

Over Low Library and inscribed in a stone over the library is a founding mandate that Columbia stands for public good. So it’s within that light that we are asking the University to make a decision. We, as students, this started as a student movement, are asking the University to make the decision to accept ROTC here. Not in the tradition of exclusion or subtraction that [inaudible] members of the Columbia community, but to add to the University a program that enhances opportunities for students, educates leaders of unique responsibility, and is profoundly imbued with the service to the public good and a belief in our democratic society, a belief that stems from the values of, the army values, for instance. that are so engrained into us—loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage, important values.

So we approach Columbia, and the same university that has nurtured a great exception that is Barnard, which is an all-women’s college, for the sake of advancing a public good. Columbia’s position on ROTC, in my opinion, is indeed counter to it, and so therefore somewhat perplexing. Columbia is refusing to allow ROTC and therefore refusing a direct influence on new military officers because in some form the military is not acceptable to the University. But it can’t suppose to be able to effect any change without exerting some influence on the culture and people that make up the institution. So as one of the world’s premier universities, Columbia should be engaging the issues directly through its own involvement, and not shirking responsibility and denying ROTC a place.

Columbia as a prime source of national and international leaders must include in its charge the education of those who are directly involved in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This is an important concept to realize. And you might ask, Why it is so critical now? Why are we trying to bring this back now? I would say from the broad perspective that the U.S. military, one of the primary means, if not the primary means, by which the U.S. enacts its foreign policy today, is in a great state of flux. September 11^th was the vertical shock (to use a phrase that is often cited today in the Pentagon) that got the ball rolling. It’s transforming in a way that hasn’t since World War II, and it’s accepting responsibilities and realizing various problems that it hasn’t experienced either since World War II or ever before. Warfare has changed, and indeed the U.S.’s role in the world has changed, and the military has to change in response.

Columbia has a chance now to be directly involved with this process. The greatest imaginable stakes fall today on the shoulders of the American military, many of whose leaders are educated through ROTC, over 60 percent, 75 percent in the Army and Air Force. Not so different a circumstance than Columbia faced fifty years ago when Columbia sent thousands of military graduates into a dynamically changing world. We live again in historic times, and today like yesterday, Columbia’s offered a singular historic opportunity, and it’s our belief that it must take it.

Now I want to go a little bit into some practical issues that weren’t discussed here, but I know it’s on some people’s minds, particularly those professors and those involved in the academy, and that is the positions of faculty members [coughing drowns out his words], military scientists, faculty members, and the summation of grades and the granting of grades for ROTC courses. Now in the past this has been a matter of absolute policy of ROTC programs, and this is the primary reason or some of the primary reasons that ROTC was ejected in the ‘60s, that the military required that ROTC be granted credit at a university and that its professors, or professors in the ROTC program, be granted the title of professor in the University.

This is still the case in many of the universities around the United States, but it’s not absolute. I point primarily to our closest sister institution, Princeton, which hosts an Army ROTC program on campus, and does not grant credit, and in which the leaders of the program, professors of military science, is not known as a professor, but is given the title of director, and those under him are given the titles of instructor. This is an arrangement that Princeton worked out with the Army, with the military, and one that I’m sure Columbia, being the premier institution that it is, would have the opportunity to make.

So, and in the area of grades, I do believe that they are listed on the transcript, but no grade is given. It does not count in the GPA. And it is considered essentially an extracurricular activity under their student development office. So that, as a matter of practicality, might alleviate some concerns based on the original arguments for getting rid of ROTC back in ’69.

But really I want to speak about Columbia as a whole. Columbia complains often, for instance, that all too often it is the underprivileged who are called to serve. And this has been a sticking point for many at Columbia. Many of the protestors who I’ve heard, many of those who are actually against ROTC, have said this and noted this about the military. Professor Silver provided some facts to the contrary, but it is still a concern for many. And yet, and that the military does not represent the whole of the United States, particularly the liberal viewpoints that Columbia so proudly espouses. That, as Professor Kellogg said, they’re just moving toward the red states. This is a problem for many on campus; many on campus consider this a crucial issue. And yet by denying ROTC a place on campus, you’re only helping it. You’re only pushing it more towards or more away from the viewpoints that Columbia so espouses, and you’re pushing it more towards underprivileged students and underprivileged persons, and not including those among the Columbia University community. So in that sense it’s somewhat hypocritical for the University to take any policy like this, to take a stance against ROTC.

Second, you’re focusing on one policy. And granted, it’s a very important policy, DADT, among a broader range of issues that is the military and a broader focus that is the military. Military is involved in many areas of society, and is again, as I said, a crucial part of our foreign policy. So Columbia has every right to oppose the policy. Columbia, you know, has every need to oppose the policy because it does go against Columbia’s viewpoints, and I support Columbia in its desire to do that. But this should not exclude ROTC.

Columbia is a flagship university, as President Bollinger has put it. It’s known for producing leaders in all areas of society. And yet it’s noticeably absent in the area of military leadership, particularly when compared to many of the other great universities of this nation. You look at Berkeley, you look at Duke, you look at Princeton. All these universities have produced military leaders for so many decades. Columbia used to. Columbia was heavily—there’s one point in Columbia’s history where it produced more naval midshipmen than even the Naval Academy. It had a proud tradition of producing leadership in the military. And when 1969 came around, when they expelled ROTC, that history, that tradition ended.

Finally there’s the main reason that I [inaudible] for ROTC in the first place, and that’s the students. From my point of view, this is a matter of improving opportunities for students. There are a whole slew of other benefits to returning ROTC. My main focus has always been the students. At this school we have a pre-professional office for medicine, for law school, for many other professions, and yet there’s nothing for students interested in the military. You might contend that the military doesn’t compare to medicine or law or business as far as training and education is concerned. I invite you to take a good look at the departments for the officer basic course, or commanding general staff college, or the National War College, before you come to that conclusion. Education is a large part of military officers’military service throughout. It is important, and it is ingrained into us as soldiers.

Financial benefits are certainly there. I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford Columbia without the help of the military. But I can tell you that the vast majority of cadets that I know do not join for the scholarship money. Neither I nor any of my friends, our participation stems from a strong desire to serve, and it is that strong desire to serve—I know there are more out there who have the strong desire to serve. They may not know where they want to serve or for whom they want to serve, but I know that that desire is there, and that desire to lead, that desire to be put in leadership positions and to lead great soldiers, to lead members of the society. And I think by bringing ROTC back that we will grant this opportunity to students, and make military service, military officership once again as a choice after graduation more so than we do now. And I think it is imperative that Columbia does this.

So on that note, I’d like to, I guess, open the floor for a question-and-answer session—with our moderator, I suppose.

CHEN: I just ask that you give your name, maybe say a little bit about yourself. The floor’s open.

JERRY BLACKWOOD: Excuse me. I don’t have a question. My name’s Dr. Jerry Blackwood. I’m a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. I’ve been in three combat theatres: one you protested, Grenada, and the first Gulf War. I’ve got to tell you something. I’m not a graduate of your school. I went to a small regional hick school called Texas A&M, which had the same background as this wonderful academic school used to have. It trained more military officers than the joint service academies at one time, just like this one did.

I, this afternoon, ran into a student protesting ROTC. I said why? This question. The answer to me was, I oppose military policy abroad. That’s a good answer since we don’t make military policy abroad. [He also said,] “I also have a problem with DADT.” And I’ve heard Professor Silver, I’ve heard a lot of people in this university since I’ve been here. I’ll bet none of you can tell me where DADT even came from. It sure as hell didn’t originate in the military. And gentlemen, you educators in this school, have a hell of an indictment of the school ‘cause most of your students today go into foreign policy and become policymakers. Gentlemen, the military are not policymakers. We’re operators. You want to put the blame on somebody, then you go over to SIPA, you go over to where my family went—and I’ll tell you what, we’re all Yankee boys. My entire family is Ivy League--Brown University—except me, probably because I was born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, not up north.

But I got to tell you something. I come from a rather [inaudible] family: all served. Do not ask, do not tell? I’m asking you guys to go down to the wall for Vietnam, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I want you to go up against those 58,000 names sitting on that wall and say, None of you were gay. Let me tell you something, gentlemen and ladies here, November 11^th, 1970, I lost a friend who was laying right next to me, after forty-eight hours’ continuous firefight, who bled to death. He was gay. And I find it absolutely horrendous that that one single issue is used. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that came from the civilian leadership passed through the U.S. military, and the U.S. military blundered in trying to find a solution.

Let me tell you why ROTC really deserves to be here. It has nothing to do with uniforms or anything else—because you educators have no right whatsoever to create limitations. Well, I’m going to create a limitation, I mean, take opinions of others and allow those opinions to become someone else’s. You have a right to fairness. This school for some reason is a magnet for controversy. I don’t get it. Either it’s the Jews arguing against the Muslims or a professor in this school, or it’s something like this stupid.

You guys have a problem with 1968 and 1969. I got news for you. It’s 2005. Get over it. I wasn’t happy going to Vietnam. I volunteered. I wasn’t happy going to war. No soldier’s happy going to war. And we’re not killing machines. We have a specific job to do. You have a specific job to do. Be evenhanded in your educational process and don’t discriminate. You have a hell of a nerve to say the U.S. military discriminates when you’re doing the same thing by not allowing it here.

What are we talking about? ROTC coming to Columbia. “Oh my god!” I mean, how many students in this school? “Everybody’s going to start wearing a uniform—run now!” Probably less than ten percent will be in uniform. That’s a big deal. And as far as the professors are concerned and their ranking, why that’s ego. I could care less. And I don’t think anybody else can either.

CHEN: Colonel?

BLACKWOOD: Excuse me. One more. But I got to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. I’m really annoyed with this tonight. I’m really annoyed with what I’m seeing today. And she’s right—we can’t even win elections. And by the way, sir, I happen to be a Democrat. Most of the officers I know were Democrats. Okay? You have [inaudible] control a good portion of the officers corps, but most of us are Democrats. I got to tell you something. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter when we were being shot at if it was Republican or Democrat. But I got to tell you something. This has got to end one of these days. We all got to grow up, regardless. Work with the system. You don’t like it, work it. If you guys want a big change in the military, you allow ROTC in here and you help it change. If you want to stay here and criticize it, well you’re doing the exact same thing you’re accusing the military of doing. Thank you. [Applause]

I don’t think you know this, gentlemen. I’ve lost five friends of mine in Iraq, three in Afghanistan. Eight. I had an entire half company wasted in Vietnam.

ANOTHER VOICE: Colonel, I appreciate—I’d like to very much listen to the other people.

BLACKWOOD: Have a good night.

CHEN: If you could include a question, that would be very helpful. Use the mike if you have questions.

ANOTHER VOICE: Colonel. . . colonel. . . colonel, where are you going?

AARON COLE: I would just like to know—

CHEN: Can you give your name?

A. COLE: My name is Aaron Cole. I’m the son of this professor right here. Basically, truthfully I don’t know a whole lot about the particulars of the issue in terms of ROTC, and so I’m not going to get into any kind of debates about that, because I don’t like to, you know, argue about things that I don’t know all the facts about. But I would just like to know how many of you here know as many young people that would be serving in this military as I do in this generation? Because I can tell you I don’t think it’s the amount that I know. I don’t think it’s the amount of people that are coming in now, that are coming in in the future, in the future of this military that you plan on expanding. You’re not from that same generation. And all I want to say is that on behalf of all us, some of us agree with the war, some of us are against it, but we know about it. Believe me. And if we want to become involved in it, we will go out and become involved in it.

So for you to add this to the equation is just further militarizing the country and the institutions that young people go to. Believe me, we know the war is on. That’s all I have to say.

BROZAK: Excuse me. Could I ask you a question?

A. COLE: Yes.

BROZAK: How old are you?

A. COLE: I’m eighteen, sir.

BROZAK: You’re eighteen. When did you turn eighteen?

A. COLE: Last June.

BROZAK: Were you registered to vote?

A. COLE: Yes, I was.

BROZAK: Did you vote?

A. COLE: Yes, I did.

BROZAK: Then you’re an exception, because most people that I know having just run for office that have turned eighteen didn’t vote. They didn’t go out there and exercise the basic minimum in terms of telling what this country should do. They didn’t go out there and make their voice known. They didn’t go out there and start to say we want to be part of this equation.

I just ran a campaign where I probably had a thousand volunteers that were eighteen, nineteen and twenty-year-olds. The idea is that you started the statement by saying that you don’t know very much about the conversation you’re talking about. It behooves you to know more about it. And if you’re going to go out there and say I’m opposed to the military, that is absolutely the right answer if you come through that decision having learned as much about the military as you possibly can.

A. COLE: Sir, I didn’t say anything about opposing the military. And you haven’t responded to the statement that I made in the first place. What you have done, on the other hand, is not responded at all to the argument that this is increasing the militarization across the country.

BROZAK: This isn’t increasing. It’s just allowing people to know more about what the decisions that are being made for them are actually taking place.

A. COLE: It isn’t increasing it, it’s just allowing people to know more about it? That’s not increasing it? It’s forced in some way by allowing people to know more about it, allowing people to have more access to it.

BROZAK: No. It’s allowing them to make rational decisions about what goes on.