To the Editor:
In response to Jennifer Grayson's '11 letter ("Requisites no reason to reject ROTC," Feb. 14) comparing the pre-med requirements to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps required courses, her comparison doesn't hold water. Giving a student a choice to pursue a medical career voluntarily because he or she is interested in it is very different than an outside entity saying "we will not give you — or will take away — your scholarship money if you don't take these nine or 10 required courses."
By way of example, lets say creationists came to Brown and said they would pay for the education of some students, but in return, those students have to:
1. Spend eight years working for us after they graduate.
2. They must not have any moral convictions against creationism — and certainly could not risk speaking out against it.
4. We would prescribe seven hours a week of their extracurricular time.
5. We would require them to take 10 specific courses.
6. They have to get their hair cut the way we want them to, and they have to wear our uniform one day a week.
7. International students, resumed undergraduate education students and overweight students are excluded, even if they wanted to join us.
Certainly, no one at Brown would support that scenario.
I never understood why some people feel Brown must have an ROTC unit. We don't have everything, nor prepare Brown students for every career, that other schools and even other Ivies have and do. University of Pennsylvania has a School of Nursing and Cornell has a School of Hotel Administration. The nursing and hospitality industries are both perfectly fine and moral industries to send students into, yet no one is clamoring to have similar programs at Brown. By the same token, no one is saying that Brown graduates cannot join the military at the officer level in the absence of ROTC.
Dave Morris '88
