A Personal Perspective on The Impact of Shrinking & Unbalanced ROTC

I remember reading this article (https://www.rallypoint.com/shared-links/no-more-urban-officers-how-an-uneven-rotc-may-change-our-military) in 2012, but I think it is even more relevant now. New England colleges, and in universities in the Northeast Corridor in general, have become even more liberal. Because of this, student participation in programs like ROTC has become harder (if not prohibitive) on multiple levels starting with finding a local Army ROTC detachment.

The main reason the article resonated with me is because, since the 1970's, I have witnessed the retreat of the ROTC from our college and university campuses. It is effectively fading away into irrelevancy. We, as a ROTC Program in particular but also has a military community, have ceded the academic battlefield to liberal progressives one campus at a time. Like our current ineffective GWOT and efforts against ISIS, we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of future leaders because of an apparent lack of strategy and leadership rooted in the lack of political will.

This is not a "marketing issue", as some have postulated. Lack of good marketing is frankly an oversimplification and belies the historical failure to push the land-grant colleges to live up to their land-grant statuses. The benefits extend beyond the initial land-grants and into current federal government funding and support. I believe most student loans and grants are also tied to the land-grant provisions as well. So despite portions of the student body in any given institution who will always create the constant tensions associated with a New England liberal education environment, marketing is just part of the solution. Without a conscious leadership decision to aggressively apply that pressure needed on the universities and their administrations, as well as address the marketing and social issues, the ROTC program will continue to dwindle in the Northeast and other liberal academic institutions of learning.

Personally, I have watched the ROTC program cede the battlefield since the 1970’s. It coincided with the end of the draft and the advent of the "All Volunteer Army," which were both driven by political necessity at that time. I watched first-hand at the University of Vermont (UVM) where a campus administration allowed the Anti-War protesters - lead by John Kerry's "Vietnam Veterans Against the War" - take over the "old field house" where ROTC was located. They even tried to break into our arms’ vault - which was, and still is, a federal crime. In the end, ROTC was moved several times throughout the years until it was removed completely off the main campus. Each move was a compromise with the ever-increasing demands of liberal student activists. They were mostly egged on by their open socialist or communist political science professors. So much for diversity and academic freedom at UVM; it died in the early 1970's with the campus sit-ins and repetitive occupations of the ROTC department offices & classrooms.

Instead of holding the UVM administration accountable and making them live up to the original land-grant charter, the ROTC program caved every step of the way. The current off-campus location was the result of a compromise so that the interested UVM students could still attend and receive credit for their ROTC courses. The activists at the time wanted ROTC relegated to an "extracurricular" activity vs being an academic course of study for graduation credits. Now that the ROTC footprint is gone from the UVM campus, I fully expect the academic credits will be gone as well. This same onslaught was happening throughout the northeast at similar liberal land-grant colleges. But this is not the half of it! Today even more cadets have to spend a lot of time and money to travel to ROTC training and, unlike the USMC commissioning program, they have no other options. (Note: USMC "cadets" train extensively during the summers and various academic breaks throughout the year.)

In the case of UVM, its science and technology departments received heavy defense research grants and support. Like myself, a good percentage of students receive “student defense" loans and grants to this day. At every step of the way, the DOD could have easily pulled these grants until the program was fully reinstated. But when I was at UVM, during the Nixon-Ford-Carter period of American history, the political will to make those moves was not really there. Today, the excuse given is, “We are deep in the GWOT,” and the DOD is staying mum on the issue.

Now, after almost 38 years of commissioned service, I am seeing some potential and inherent dangers in this stratification within each ROTC class. We are breeding our future Army & Reserve leaders from increasingly less diverse academic populations. Inner-city northeastern urban colleges are more and more underrepresented with each passing ROTC class, and I personally think it could weaken the officer corps coming out of ROTC programs. At the same time, those institutions of higher education and champions of diversity are cutting out a vital segment of intellectual thoughts and perspectives. The intrinsic value of ROTC represents a more conservative approach to leadership and character building than currently offered on most campuses. It is, and was, an existential threat to the progressive liberal thought and leftist teachings.

Having listened to a senior graduate student - you may know him better as democratic presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders - expound upon this topic in one of my advanced political science classes, I know this to be true. The bottom line for me is that the current state of the ROTC is a lose-lose deal, and this needs to be an issue that senior leadership takes up.