On an early May morning 43 years ago, fire swept through Stanford University’s Navy ROTC building, destroying a structure that had been damaged in another suspicious blaze just two months earlier.
No arrests were ever made in the two arson fires, but they came at a time of angry, sometimes violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War on college campuses nationwide. Those protests often targeted the closest symbol of the U.S. military, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps — with more than 200 campus ROTC units reporting vandalism during that war.
It is a much different time.
On a recent afternoon, Stanford senior Ann Thompson wore her Army ROTC uniform with pride as she chatted with visitors about ROTC scholarships. Nearby, a few dozen students marched to protest the program’s likely expansion at Stanford.
“There definitely are people not supportive of ROTC, but we still have respectful conversations,” said Thompson, 22, of Paso Robles, Calif. “I can’t fathom anyone burning a building down.”
In another sign of the changing times, the congressional rescinding last year of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly in the military has recently led Stanford, Harvard and several other elite universities to take steps to welcome the ROTC back to their campuses for the first time in four decades.
On-campus military training still raises hackles for some. Yet even critics acknowledge that most current college students are willing to accept the ROTC.
Gay activist Marco Chan helped organize anti-ROTC rallies at Harvard this spring, focusing on the military’s continuing ban against transgender individuals. A senior from Vancouver, Chan, 23, called the school’s decision to restore the ROTC discriminatory: “To make a highly symbolic gesture, Harvard has thrown its own student body under the bus,” he said.
But Chan said many Harvard students seemed sympathetic to the military. “They grew up in a post-9/11 world,” he said. “The war on terror has been a part of their daily lives.”
Jimmy Ruck, a 21-year-old Stanford senior and Army ROTC cadet from Millbrae, Calif., was set to join a military intelligence unit as a second lieutenant after his June graduation.
“We are putting a face on the military, showing that we are not some faceless, heartless machine, that we are individual human beings and that we are doing this for a variety of reasons,” Ruck said. “Some are doing it for leadership, for public service, or if you want to pay for your college.”
Experts say the recent change of heart by influential American universities will boost the prestige of the program, which was founded during the Civil War on the belief that the nation needs a well-educated officer corps imbued with civilian values.
“It shows historically that the military and civilian society are trying to bridge the gap,” said Donald Downs, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of a new book about the ROTC.
But those schools still will play a small role in the national ROTC, which never left most U.S. campuses. Nearly 500 units are in existence, and many other schools without their own programs send students to train at other area colleges.
Despite UC Berkeley’s reputation as a center of ’60s radicalism, the ROTC remained on campus, and about 150 students are now enrolled.
Don Johnson, a rhetoric major from Oakland, Calif., who was set to become an Army second lieutenant, said off-campus antiwar activists have hassled him when he’s worn his ROTC uniform. But no student ever bothered him.
“Usually, people will ask what I’m doing after school and a lot of seniors understand the need for a job, and the fact that I have one makes them envious,” said Johnson, 22.
In the Vietnam era, hostility toward ROTC programs soared as the war’s casualties increased and reached a height when U.S. troops were sent into Cambodia in 1970. Student protesters occupied ROTC centers at many colleges, and fires and explosions damaged the program’s buildings at the University of Michigan, Kent State University and the University of Colorado.
The ROTC was pushed off some campuses after faculty and administrators stopped giving academic credit for its courses and imposed other restrictions. Programs elsewhere died for lack of interest after the draft ended in 1973 and fewer men sought to become officers as a way to survive the war.
From 1968 to 1974, the ROTC closed 88 units, many at private schools in the Northeast, and opened 80 replacements, mainly at friendlier public colleges in the South and Midwest, according to Michael Neiberg, a military historian at the University of Southern Mississippi who wrote a book about the program.
Nowadays, the Pentagon is happy to be wooed by Stanford and other top private schools. And at schools with the ROTC, students and administrators say the program has become just another strand in the fabric of campus life.
“It’s just another thing that’s here, that’s available,” said Michelle McGrain, a graduate student at the University of Maryland. The student response “is kind of neutral,” she said. “It’s not a huge issue.”
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