Get Herald RSSThe perennial debate over whether the Reserve Officer Training Corps should have a home on Brown's campus may be reinvigorated with the creation of a new student group - tentatively called "Advocates for Brown ROTC" - calling for the military program's reinstitution on College Hill.
Jason Carr '09 and Josh Teitelbaum '08 founded the group to take steps toward breaking down the campus community's isolation from what they say is an important social institution.
"The military is a big part of society, and as of the moment, Brown has chosen to separate itself from it, and I believe it's a bad decision on their part," Carr said. "Brown graduates should be exposed to all walks of life, and exposure to the military can certainly inform Brown students."
Since Brown's own ROTC program left campus in 1971 over faculty protests of the Vietnam War, students pursuing ROTC have participated in the Army program at Providence College, the Patriot Battalion, which also serves several other campuses in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts.
Currently, only one Brown student is participating in the Patriot Battalion, according to Lt. Col. Paul Dulchinos, the battalion's commander and a professor of military science at Providence College. Since a spike of 11 Brown cadets in 1991, he said he typically graduates only one or no Brown students from the program each year.
Nevertheless, Carr said it's hard to gauge the true interest in ROTC on campus when institutional barriers make participation in the program difficult for Brown students. Carr said he considered joining an ROTC program but chose not to participate in the Patriot Battalion while at Brown because the University does not give credit for military science classes taken at Providence College.
For this reason, Teitelbaum said, the primary goal of Advocates for Brown ROTC will be persuading the University to award course credit for ROTC classes. The group held a meeting with Dulchinos Wednesday night to finalize a proposal it plans to present to Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 and the College Curriculum Council.
Short of establishing a full-fledged ROTC program at Brown, Dulchinos said, there are other intermediate steps the University can take to support students who want to pursue ROTC. He said he has met with Bergeron and Dean of Admission Jim Miller '73 to discuss the possibility of including Providence College's ROTC course offerings in Brown registration catalogs or evaluating ROTC participation as a favorable attribute in admission decisions.
Dulchinos said he thinks Brown students have something the military increasingly wants - the ability to think critically and process information creatively.
"The biggest thing that (the military is) trying right now is to create adaptive leaders because of the rapid nature of the conflicts at hand, and our enemy is rapidly changing and adapting," he said.
"If you had everyone go through a military academy, you would have a much more rigid and a less openly thinking type of leadership, perhaps because they've all gone through one particular chute," Dulchinos added. Dulchinos said ROTC is a better way to produce officers than through the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Teitelbaum also suggested that the military is now taking specific action to create an officer corps that is more diverse.
"The Department of Defense had made statements in the last couple of years indicating basically that they are more or less willing … to divert funding from other programs that have been more traditionally quote-unquote successful in the interest of attracting officers from more elite institutions," Teitelbaum said.
Associate Dean of the College Linda Dunleavy said during her two years as Brown's adviser for ROTC, she's never had an undergraduate approach her for information, but she has noticed increased efforts on behalf of the Providence College ROTC program to reach out to Brown students.
"They've been putting some pressure on various offices to try to see if they can come and actually leaflet on campus and recruit," she said.
Annie Koenig '08, who participated in a panel debate last week hosted by an international relations seminar she is taking on the U.S. military, said she recognizes the current divide between the military and academia, but she said she doesn't think ROTC will resolve it because the program is essentially incompatible with the liberal arts university in America.
"They're serving two different purposes. A liberal arts education is to basically learn tools of inquiry and to diversify. What the military teaches you is completely the opposite. It's a more didactic learning style. It's officer-led and it teaches you to conform," Koenig said.
Though Teitelbaum said he applauds the general discussion on campus about ROTC, he hopes that by taking action to bring about ROTC's return, his group can go a step beyond detached dialogue.
"I think it will do something very different than just having a series of intellectual discussions on the issue," he said. "There is a real war going on, and there is no reason for there to be this level of detachment from it."
