In 1971, the Brown faculty decided to remove the Reserve Officer Training Corps from campus, citing the program's failure to convert from departmental to extracurricular status. Now, in the midst of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been renewed mobilization for and against the return of ROTC and the presence of defense contractors at career fairs. The policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the "war on terror," accusations of privileged distance and fears of the campus militarization are some of the central pivots around which ROTC is discussed.
The Brown student body should not be isolated from the ROTC debate. As the slavery and justice committee demonstrated, the University is the ideal setting for the discussion of controversial social issues. So to facilitate this discussion, the international relations seminar IR 180.6: "The American Military" is hosting a discussion panel and debate on ROTC at Brown tonight at the Watson Institute.
ROTC is run at universities throughout the country, providing its students with training in leadership, military history, military tactics and professional ethics. It produces more than 60 percent of the officers in the armed forces, and 75 percent of those in the Army. ROTC was continuously present at Brown from 1916 until 1971. The student movement to abolish ROTC began in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War. Attempts by the faculty to negotiate a transition from department to extracurricular status failed, and the faculty voted to remove ROTC from campus.
Since 1971, a few Brown undergraduates have traveled to Providence College to participate in its ROTC program. There are structural barriers to increased participation there, as Brown students receive no course credit or transportation assistance. Successful programs currently exist at Cornell, Harvard/Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton universities. Meanwhile, Brown continues to receive defense contracts. These do not come with the same conditions as the ROTC program, yet they reveal the other ways in which the University contributes to and receives support from the Pentagon.
The return of ROTC encompasses issues of burdens and opportunity, privilege and duty, exclusion and citizenship and militarization and patriotism. It incorporates issues of who serves in the armed forces, as well as those concerning the rights and contested obligations of citizens and students in a time of conflict. America's political and economic elite are seen to be absent from military service. The socioeconomically disadvantaged constitute the vast majority of new recruits, while the government has expanded its reliance on private military companies for core military tasks. An engagement with the tensions between these issues is required of any informed university community.
Brown has no obligation to discuss ROTC. But it does have a special opportunity to open a campus dialogue on issues of citizenship, socio-economic privilege, militarization and the university's function in a time of conflict. Please join us at 8 p.m. in the McKinney Conference Room, on the third floor of the Watson Institute.
Adam Swartzbaugh '09, Rita Cidre '07, Gordon MacGill '07, Pratik Chougule '08, Anne Koenig '08 and Visiting Fellow in International Studies Michael Bhatia '99 will be there, and according to anonymous sources, they're smoking hot.
