Last week, a federal district court declared the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy unconstitutional in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States. By Thursday the Obama administration asked the court to pause the enforcement while they appealed it. Though this Monday the federal judge said she was leaning to reject the request.
While this decision has obvious implications for many facets of the country, some of the most interesting changes will be on the campuses of many elite universities. The divorce between the Ivy League and ROTC programs came about during the Vietnam War, when student activism came to a fever pitch. However, schools like Harvard have cited DADT for their continual refusal to keep ROTC programs off-campus. Columbia has an off-campus program but I am told the cadets have been trying to improve relations with the university in hopes of ushering a return of a program on campus in the future. Brown and Yale also have off-campus locations, while Princeton has a hybrid with Rutgers and Dartmouth has one technically fused with nearby Norwich University. Our own Cornell has a ROTC program that has had a series of interesting articles published advocating for and against it in years past.
It will be interesting to see how schools and students react to the news of DADT. Will administrations fall upon a different excuse to not host programs? Will the numbers for enrollment in programs increase? The Ivy League has long fallen under scrutiny for producing members of an academic class who do not contribute their intelligence towards national interests, sitting behind desks instead. Perhaps a new perspective on the military will emerge. With the restoration of programs across the country, maybe some students will have better options to choose from because of an increase in tuition affordability through military service. In my own New York City, only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of students participate in ROTC service because of their proximity to the boroughs. One can only imagine the possibilities that will open up for enrollment if these students are given the opportunity to train closer to home. At this point, it is up in the air.
