ROTC Rewarded With Full Scholarships

By Michael C. Russell | Friday, January 20, 2006

Major General W. Montague Winfield, Commanding Officer of the National Reserve Officer Training Corps, has announced that cadets at Dartmouth, as well as at 16 other “elite” institutions, will now be eligible for a full scholarship, regardless of financial need. The news comes in the aftermath of a meeting this past June between President James Wright, Dean of the College Jim Larimore, and Winfield’s predecessor as head of ROTC, Gen. Thrasher. Larimore stated that the administration was understandably “very happy” about the army’s decision, but that the administration “continues to be concerned about the federal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”

This is positive news, for no student organization — other than The Dartmouth Review— has ever received as much opposition from fringe groups and faculty as the ROTC program. Its history has been long and unpredictable. Many will forget, but Dartmouth once supported all three ROTC programs, which had an aggregate enrollment of about 50% of the student body before their precipitous fall in the spring months of 1969. For years after ROTC was banned from campus and even after it was finally brought back, it was reduced to obscurity thanks to the faculty’s castigation.

The arguments against ROTC programs have evolved over time, but they came first to Dartmouth by way of peace protestors, wearing black armbands at a parade to protest the Vietnam Conflict. These protestors called for the immediate end of ROTC at Dartmouth, as they viewed it as an endorsement of imperialistic American policy in South East Asia. It was not the ROTC that was necessarily an evil, but what it represented: American foreign policy and the US military, which was unjustly characterized at the time as ‘baby-killer.’ Students focused their frustration with Vietnam on the one part of the war effort they could damage, the ROTC. So, as the 1960s waned, the influence, and radicalism of Dartmouth’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society waxed and culminated in the May 1969 takeover of Parkhurst by 75 students and two professors.

After the relatively peaceful takeover of the administration building, John Sloan Dickey reluctantly oversaw the dismantling of the program he had spent decades building. Dickey would, however, see the last years of enthusiastic college wide ROTC participation. To date, the total number of ROTC cadets who have graduated from Dartmouth since its reinstitution nearly equals the number of cadets graduating during any given year of Dickey’s Presidency.

When David T. McLaughlin ’54, T’55 returned to Dartmouth in 1981, he found his college a university after a decade of John G. Kemeny’s stewardship. Within three years of McLaughlin’s inauguration the Board of Trustees voted on a measure to examine the possibility of inviting a Navy ROTC program to campus. The Student Assembly after polling the student body and finding overwhelming support for the reintroduction of an ROTC program, endorsed McLaughlin’s plan. The only dissent stemmed from the faculty, who voted 125-52 and 113-39 against Navy and Army ROTC programs, respectively. So, over faculty objection, the Trustees created a program that would allow Dartmouth students to enroll in the ROTC program at Norwich University.

However, Dartmouth and the ROTC’s honeymoon was cut short thanks to the ascendancy of James O. Freedman to the office of President. It was against the background of the gay-rights movement of the 1980’s and early 1990’s that the debate against ROTC evolved into one over equality. The objection to the restitution of ROTC was that it would be an implicit endorsement by the college of a ‘bigoted institution.’ Had it not been for Clinton’s “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell” policy, ROTC would have been banned again, and, though the faculty voted unanimously against it, the Trustees voted to maintain the program.

For over a decade Dartmouth’s ROTC program languished in obscurity and found itself unable to offer the same scholarships that peer programs could, because of the College’s policy. And while Dartmouth cadets have gone on to serve their nation with distinction, their ranks have been sadly diminished.

Now, for the first time in over a generation, Dartmouth will be able to provide students who want to serve in our nation’s military the same opportunity they would receive at any other college. After the success of men like Nathaniel Fick, Dartmouth students once more have models of intelligent men, who seek a higher purpose for their lives than banking or consulting. In these days of war it is essential that leaders of institutions such as Dartmouth view the military as an alternative so that they can furnish it with educated leadership.

Peace is not achieved by words alone, and as our European peers are realizing it is necessary to have a strong, well trained and intelligent military prepared to defend the words of diplomats. So while a degree in international relations may qualify one to make deals, it is the soldiers who enforce them. As Vegetius once said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

ROTC Rewarded With Full Scholarships

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