Fighting ROTC

Contributed by Charles B. Bratton II

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act and established the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) across America’s civilian college campuses.¹ With World War I raging, Wilson saw the need for a new program to bolster the ranks of the armed forces with college-educated officers. Harvard University, alongside the University of California Berkeley and Norwich University, was among the first to embrace this new initiative.² The creation of ROTC reflected a widespread desire to prepare the nation for future conflicts, especially amidst such an uncertain time, by creating a reliable pipeline of well-educated officers.

At first glance, Harvard’s participation in ROTC seemed to embody the best of both worlds—it integrated academic rigor and military discipline for students. For much of the early and mid-20th century, the university prided itself on its contributions to the nation’s military leadership. The ROTC program produced graduates who valiantly served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.³ In turn, Harvard was responsible for helping to “civilianize” the military by equipping officers with a liberal education. This symbiotic relationship would soon sour, however, as the political and cultural currents of the Vietnam War era triggered a dramatic rethinking of Harvard’s role in U.S. military affairs.

The cracks began to appear during the turbulent 1960s when the anti-war movement took hold of college campuses across the country, including Harvard’s. In 1969, a flashpoint was reached. Student and faculty protesters, driven by the growing moral outrage against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, stormed University Hall, confronting university administrators with demands that included the removal of ROTC from campus.⁴ The image of students occupying the building and nailing their grievances to University President Nathan M. Pusey’s door à la Luther’s 95 Theses remains one of the most symbolic moments in Harvard’s history, emblematic of the broader cultural rebellion against the establishment, including the university administration and the military itself.⁵

Faced with immense pressure from within, Harvard yielded. The administration demoted ROTC to an extracurricular activity, a mere shell of its former self, and by the end of the year, the program was formally abolished from campus.⁶ For Harvard, the decision was not just about Vietnam—it was a repudiation of the military’s place in the university. With its rigid structure and direct ties to the federal government, ROTC seemed increasingly out of step with the progressive values beginning to define Harvard’s identity. Critics within the university argued that the presence of ROTC compromised academic freedom and blurred the line between intellectual inquiry and military propaganda.

Other elite institutions, including Columbia, Brown, and Yale, soon followed suit.⁷ Columbia dismantled its ROTC program after the student strike of 1968, a bloody and bitter conflict that saw students beaten and arrested by police. In 1972, Brown University’s faculty voted to allow the Navy’s ROTC contract to expire, effectively ending the program.⁸ The justifications were strikingly similar across these campuses: ROTC was viewed as an institution that compromised the university’s role as a sanctuary for free thought and intellectual exploration. Instead, ROTC was treated as an arm of the military-industrial complex, which had no place in higher education.

The consequences of these decisions were long-lasting. Harvard’s severing of ties with ROTC, produced by a broader disconnection between the university and the military, coincided with the nation’s shifting attitudes toward authority, patriotism, and war. For nearly a decade, ROTC had vanished entirely from Harvard. It was not until 1976, seven years after the program’s removal, that Harvard students were again allowed to participate in ROTC, albeit through MIT’s program, where they were required to travel for training.⁹ This uneasy compromise allowed the university to keep ROTC at arm’s length while avoiding outright hostility to students interested in military service.

The compromise was also delicate. In the 1990s, the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which barred openly gay service members from serving, put Harvard at odds with the military’s policies once again.¹⁰ Harvard suspended all financial support for students participating in MIT’s ROTC program. The university’s stance was clear: as long as the military upheld supposedly discriminatory policies, Harvard would not provide institutional support for ROTC, even if that meant forcing students to bear the financial burden of their training.

It was not until 2011, following the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, that Harvard officially re-engaged with ROTC.¹¹ University President Drew Faust, in collaboration with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, reinstated the Naval ROTC program on campus.¹² The return of Army and Air Force ROTC followed in 2013 and 2016, respectively.¹³ While some hailed this re-recognition of ROTC as a step toward mending the university’s relationship with the military, the reality is that Harvard’s embrace of the program has been lukewarm at best. ROTC remains peripheral primarily to campus life, with most students still required to travel to MIT for their training and only a handful of activities taking place at Harvard.

This half-hearted reconciliation exposes the deeper tensions between Harvard’s progressive identity and its role in training military officers. While university leadership has made symbolic gestures toward embracing ROTC, the program’s presence on campus remains minimal, and student resistance to the military’s influence remains palpable. In 2011, when President Faust announced that ROTC would return to campus, student protests emerged once again, this time focused on the military’s policies regarding transgender service members and unequal treatment of same-sex marriages.¹⁴ These protests highlighted the ongoing friction between Harvard’s commitment to social justice and its uneasy accommodation of the U.S. military.

Moreover, recent events have underscored the fragility of Harvard’s relationship with ROTC. As recently as this past semester, ROTC cadets were advised not to wear their uniforms on campus due to concerns for their safety during pro-Palestinian protests. The fact that military students could be targeted for their affiliation with the armed forces reveals how far Harvard has yet to go in reconciling its military past with its present values. While the university may celebrate the return of ROTC in official ceremonies, the reality is that military students remain a small and isolated group within a larger campus culture that often views them with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Whether Harvard can fully embrace its role in training military leaders without compromising its progressive values remains unseen. The university’s current approach—allowing ROTC to exist but keeping it on the margins—suggests an unwillingness to engage deeply with the complexities of its relationship with the military. For all its public gestures toward reconciliation, Harvard continues to treat ROTC as an afterthought, relegating it to a position of peripheral importance on campus. This reluctance to fully integrate military training into the fabric of university life speaks to a more profound unease about the military’s role in a modern liberal institution.

Given ongoing cultural divides on campus, it seems that Harvard’s relationship with ROTC will remain ambivalent at best. Yet, if the university truly wants to produce the leaders of tomorrow, it needs to reckon with the realities of national security. Or, at the very least, it needs to learn from its ROTC students and put the country first. 

HIPPOCRATES

A version of this article originally appeared in Harvard Eternal, the September 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. “History,” US Army Cadet Command.

2. “The Return of ROTC,” Harvard Gazette.

3. Paul E. Mawn, ”Harvard and the US Military - an Introspection.”

4. “Participants Recall the Harvard Bust and Strike, and Its Aftermath,” Harvard Magazine.

5. “‘Haunted by the War’: Remembering The University Hall Takeover of 1969,” The Harvard Crimson, 2019.

6. “1969: The Spring That Shook Harvard,” The Harvard Crimson, 1989.

7. “Hunter Fast ’12: The Case for ROTC at Brown” The Brown Daily Herald.

8. “Brown ROTC: A History,” Brown Alumni Magazine.

9. “The Return of ROTC,” Harvard Gazette.

10. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Harvard ROTC,” Harvard Political Review.

11. Lewin and Hartocollis, ”Top Colleges Reconsider R.O.T.C. After ’Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Vote”, The New York Times, 2010.

12. Drew Faust, ”Remarks by President Drew Gilpin Faust at signing of ROTC agreement between Harvard University and United States Air Force,” 2016.

13. Ibid.

14. “Law School Students Protest Military’s Transgender Ban,” The Harvard Crimson, 2017.