ROTC Under Fire

At 15 major U.S. universities, from New Jersey's Rutgers to the University of Hawaii, students are protesting compulsory membership in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Pacifist groups sometimes exploit the protest, as they did in the pre-World War II days; but the real complaint is the U.S. Army's archaic training course on campus. While wags deride the jazzy new forest-green uniform ("Robin Hood's Men"), those who wear it resent long hours of playing doughboy with World War I machine guns. Last week dissidents were stirring up many a state university campus. Samples:

P: Michigan State University (enrollment: 19,000) in East Lansing, where the faculty voted 400 to 248 to abolish compulsory ROTC. The six-man board of trustees was split, postponed its decisive vote for 60 days.

P: Arizona State University (10,000) near Phoenix, where four student leaders resigned from a student-faculty committee studying the issue, charged faculty members with "promilitary" bias. Others collected 750 signatures on an anti-ROTC petition, got another 1,500 signatures at Tucson's University of Arizona (11,700).

P: University of California at Berkeley (20,000), where student leaders set up petition-signing booths, predicted 5,000 signatures by this weekend. Berkeley's movement reached a high point last October when Freshman Frederick Moore Jr., pacifist son of an Air Force colonel, went on a 59-hour, anti-ROTC hunger strike, took an "honorary withdrawal" from the university.

If any big school gives in, the protest might spread like panty raids. No fewer than 154 U.S. colleges and universities require basic Army ROTC for every able-bodied nonveteran in freshman and sophomore classes. (Another 80 schools have small volunteer units.) Training officers admit that Army's basic ROTC enrollment (national total: 127,000 students) might fall to one-fifth of the present level in some schools if compulsion ended.

The Army has a war-tested faith in ROTC, source of 90% of company grade officers commanding troops during the early days of World War II. By putting 5,850 new second lieutenants on active duty this year, ROTC will fill 69% of the Army's need for new officers. But is compulsion necessary? The Navy's volunteer ROTC program includes a first-rate scholarship scheme that produces fine officers with fewer dropouts. The Air Force is already trying to end the massive "lost motion" of its semi-compulsory ROTC program (TIME. Dec. 28). Some Pentagon experts estimate that half the Army's college units could lose their compulsory status by 1970 without endangering the Army's supply of new officers.

At week's end the Army seemed to be retreating sidewise. In a press release titled "U.S. Army Aligns with Educators," Army Secretary Wilber Brucker announced the end of college classes in machine-gun dry firing and other venerable exercises, turned the time over to normal academic subjects. Defense Secretary Thomas S. Gates also seemed prepared to say out loud that no military requirement exists for compulsory ROTC. Under the circumstances, many a college may decide to make ROTC voluntary.

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