I was never an ardent supporter of “Don’t ask don’t tell.” Of course, it’s difficult to support a half-measure. I am generally receptive to both arguments for whether or not gays should be permitted to serve in the military, but tend to come down on the side that our civilian leadership should pursue policies that unburden soldiers of the complexities that come with sexuality as much as possible. Of course, DADT (I hate that acronym; it feels like what I would call my father if he happened to be Mr. T.) was used as a smokescreen for years by private universities to bar ROTC programs from campus. If there’s a silver lining on the tiny puff of a dark cloud that was the DADT repeal, it is that this canard is delegitimized and private universities must confront their own silly, anti-American biases.
'Don't ask, don't tell' has been repealed. ROTC still shouldn't be on campus.
By Colman McCarthy
Before we move on, check out this guy’s Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colman_McCarthy) Pacifist? Anarchist? Classic.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Now that asking and telling has ceased to be problematic in military circles, ROTC has resurfaced as a national issue:
This is still very much a niche issue. DADT was a niche issue. No one outside the gay community thought it was a priority.
Will universities such as Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools be opened to Reserve Officers' Training Corps since colleges can no longer can argue that the military is biased against gays and therefore not welcome?
Don’t underestimate the counterintuitive chicanery of the learned and bespectacled. Your colleagues in academia regularly argue such this blather. I can hear it now: “the United States military has a long record of [blah blah blah] and the wounds from the dark days of “don’t ask don’t tell” are still raw…[story courageous gay Marine facing persecution]…this university is a sacrosanct institution of higher learning devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Now let’s all go get some grant money to give crystal meth to giraffes or break ground on the new “Neville Chamberlain Peace Studies and Nonviolent Conflict Resolution Center” building.
The debate reminds me of an interview I conducted over parents' weekend at the University of Notre Dame in 1989.
How timely. After you’re done, I have a totally awesome story about how I learned how to use Lego®s. (What do you want? I was 3.)
I sat down with Theodore Hesburgh, the priest who had retired two years earlier after serving 35 years as the university's president. Graciously, he invited me to lunch at the campus inn.
::waits patiently for relevant information::
During our discussion, he took modest pride at having raised more than a billion dollars for Notre Dame, and expressed similar feelings about the university's ROTC program. More than 700 student-cadets were in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
Roughly 6% of the student body.
Few universities, public or private, had a larger percentage of students in uniform then. The school could have been renamed Fort Hesburgh
Was that a joke? Really, I can’t tell.
When I suggested that Notre Dame's hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school's many positives,
Subtle.
Hesburgh disagreed.
As do all of us who aren’t bathing in the self-righteousness that comes from a complete detachment from reality.
Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame's ROTC program was a way to "Christianize the military," he stated firmly.
I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat,
Combat is not slaughter. Men slaughter pigs and cows and chickens. It is intentionally arbitrary. The word exists for killing in a manner where fighting would be ridiculous. The similarity, of course, is that both combat and slaughter, differing in both purpose and execution, are both necessary.
or a Christian way of firebombing cities,
(Full disclosure: I’m an avowed atheist) That is pretty much the entire purpose of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah
or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus.
Civilian casualties are a part of war. They have been a part of all wars. When committed by the United States
That said, the United States
Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ's teaching of loving one's enemies?
There is a difference between loving your enemy and subjugating yourself to him.
The interview quickly slid downhill.
Because you mocked the man’s religion and labeled his students war criminals and bible-thumping crusaders. You’re lucky you got out of there without a black eye, even if you were talking to a priest.
These days, the academic senates of the Ivies and other schools are no doubt pondering the return of military recruiters to their campuses. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, which oversees ROTC programs on more than 300 campuses, has to be asking if it wants to expand to the elite campuses, where old antipathies are remembered on both sides.
Damn hippies.
It should not be forgotten that schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."
If shrieking “killers!” in the face of ideological opponents is the hallmark of legitimate and moral reasoning, well, the left has a lot of re-thinking to do on the abortion issue.
They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.
Actually, “those who, for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts,” by definition, can’t stand for anything, lest they risk militarizing their opponents.
They can stand with Martin Luther King Jr.
Requisite hero-worship and invocation of personal morality beyond reproach.
and his view of America
That is, if you ascribe to the notion that war is, in abstract, madness. Certainly on the ground, war can feel chaotic, but we elect sober, responsible leaders so that the high-level trajectory of our military incursions is not random, incoherent, or mad.
Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive this country into record depths of debt.
Oh please open this can of worms. The moral justification for a private university barring ROTC programs is about the public debt? Does that finally mean that debt is a moral issue?
The defense budget has more than doubled since 2000, to over $700 billion.
A ten year doubling period means an approximate growth rate of 7.2%. Considering that we’ve been drawn into two wars since 2000, a growth rate a full percentage point lower than the S&P 500 geometric mean returns seems pretty reasonable. I’d like to ask, what’s the rate of growth for school budgets? Tuition costs?
They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart , Earlham, Goshen , Guilford
Nihilism 101, Dependency and Self-immolation 221, Embracing Stockholm Syndrome 302, and a graduate thesis on The Sublime Freedom of Subjugation.
Serve your country after college, these schools say, but consider the Peace Corps as well as the Marine Corps.
The Peace Corps isn’t about service. It’s about delaying your life to embrace a self-serving quest for purpose and meaning. If that’s your thing, stop planting soy beans in Ethiopia America
Will the Ivies have the courage for such stands? I'm doubtful. Only one of the eight Ivy League schools - Cornell - offers a degree in peace studies.
That’s not why Cornell is a laughingstock, but it doesn’t help. Also, I’m not sure how offering a worthless piece of paper translates into heightened morality.
Their pride in running programs in women's studies, black studies, and gay and lesbian studies is well-founded,
Not to get sidetracked, but those programs are laughable. They’re petty, biased, and infamous for harboring extreme left-wing ideologues that use their position to indoctrinate students.
but schools have small claims to greatness so long as the study of peace is not equal to the other departments when it comes to size and funding.
Please reread this sentence and come back once your ire’s good and healthy.
Now what the fuck is this? Greatness is defined by “peace studies?” It’s a made-up field. Peace, in and of itself, is also not a laudable goal. Anyone can forge peace if they surrender enough. This guy is lobbying for an Ivy League job in a national newspaper? Who the hell are the editors here?
At Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several following, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses.
Coming from a professor of Peace Studies? Those bullshit curriculums define the “softie course.” Why? Two reasons: 1) the professors are dickless, and 2) the professors know that their funding is contingent on the size of the department, and even college kids are, by and large, smart enough to know that “Peace Studies” is a degree that will get you laughed out of job interviews that actually pay. Also, all the ROTC guys I knew were engineers. I know it’s not Walden, but electrical resistance is pretty important too. Also, have I mentioned my disdain for Henry David Thoreau?
The many students I interviewed were candid about their reasons for signing up: free tuition and monthly stipends, plus the guarantee of a job in the military after college.
All reasonable positions, but somehow I don’t trust his ability to filter their sentiments into two sentences.
With some exceptions, they were mainly from families that couldn't afford ever-rising college tabs.
Who can afford $45k+ per year? Especially when most top tier schools give preferential treatment in the guise of affirmative action to lower income applicants? Everyone else either gets scholarships or student loans. No one actually buys the argument that college is inaccessible for low-income kids without ROTC assistance. That said, it helps.
To oppose ROTC, as I have
Once again, a tastefully subtle homage to his own impeccable morality.
since my college days in the 1960s,
Fertile grounds for this blossoming smugness. Let me make this clear: you, Mr. McCarthy, are a member of the worst generation to ever live in this country. Your youthful rebellions were petty, self-centered, and ill-conceived. The entire hippie movement was based on lies and chemical ingestion. Your draft-dodging antics were nothing short of despicable. Your political choices—Republicans included until 1980—were terrible. Jim Morrison was a douche and Acid Rock/hippie culture did more to ruin the Beatles than Yoko Ono. You continue to milk Social Security and pension benefits as though you’ve earned them. You raised your children into a world in which everything from dodgeballs to nuclear apocalypse was to be feared, monitored, and ultimately regulated. And it is only by the grace of the military, which you abhor, that America never turned into East Germany
when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier.
You just accused them of killing civilians and slaughtering enemies. You can’t abstract that upon the military and absolve those committing the crimes. Yes, Mr. McCarthy, you are anti-soldier.
I admire those who join armies, whether America
WHAT THE FUCK?!?!
for their discipline,
You can find that in a football team.
for their loyalty to their buddies
You can find that in a gang.
and to their principles,
You can find that in a church.
for their sacrifices to be away from home.
You can find that at a summer camp. None of these attributes are what make soldiers great.
In recent years, I've had several Iraq and Afghanistan
The peace movement attracts spineless weenies and neck-bearded idealists (Two Thoreau references in one post? Yeah I just did that.) who are prone to excessive whining and blocking out the realities of their existence. Those are not valued attributes in the military, but the peace movement certainly coddles them
ROTC and its warrior ethic
Which you just praised two sentences ago, I’ll remind you.
taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace.
No one means that when they say “intellectual purity.” That drivel isn’t a definition for intellectual purity at all. In fact, it’s neither intellectual nor pure. It’s a mission statement for a drum circle based in a misunderstanding of geopolitics and human nature more often found in bedtime stories.
If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge
Non-sequitur. Corporations regularly shape curriculums in business schools because it better prepares students for the professional environment. Scholarships are often given to students with restrictions on fields of study. Neither of these stipulations implies any ownership over the university or its day-to-day functionality.
Colman McCarthy, a former Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington
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