Now that gays are free to serve openly in America’s military, what’s next?
Well, obviously, the armed forces are looking at significant change.
America’s elite universities and colleges should prepare for the same.
Opponents of DADT long called it an unfair discriminatory law. We’d suggest that the discrimination wasn’t wholly irrational, and odds are that will become more clear as the above-mentioned transformation proceeds.
But DADT also enabled places of higher education to engage in institutional discrimination themselves — against the armed services.
A disdain for the military at many elite schools has defined campus life for decades; Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs have been widely banned — initially, in reaction to the Vietnam War, with DADT becoming the fig leaf more recently.
But with the Vietnam War’s having been over for some time and with DADT now scrapped, will the exclusion of ROTC continue?
To their credit, Harvard and Yale almost immediately announced plans to lift the ROTC ban. Columbia President Lee Bollinger also offered a rhetorical endorsement, noting, “We now have the opportunity for a new era in the relationship between universities and our military services.”
That’s far short of a promise to restore ROTC — it sometimes seems that Bollinger earned his Ph.D. in double-speak — but here’s hoping Columbia follows Harvard and Yale in welcoming the program back.
At a time when the nation is involved in two wars, the vast cultural gap that exists between America’s most elite academic institutions and its uniformed military ultimately damages both institutions — and the nation as a whole.
As then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said of his alma mater two years ago, “The notion that young people here at Columbia or anywhere, in any university, aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think, is a mistake.”
No better time than now to correct that mistake.