For ROTC, the War Is Over

By Kenneth M. Pierce

Uniforms, like patriotism, make a comeback on campuses

In 1969, antiwar protesters sprayed chicken blood over ROTC classrooms at the City College of New York. A year later, vandals trashed the Navy ROTC building at Northwestern in Evanston, Ill., forcing the program to move under Dyche Stadium. Throughout the U.S., armed forces instructors took to wearing civilian clothes when they walked on campus. Recalls one: "There was no sense in being harassed."

But today, instructors are visible again, and the Reserve Officers Training Corps programs of the Army, Navy and Air Force are making a comeback. Enrollment is up, and so is the prestige of ROTC. "They're not knocking our doors down," says a Washington-based ROTC official, "but it is better." As Barbara Patton, 24, a cadet at Pennsylvania's Drexel University, puts it, "The war is over."

In 1973, the year the draft was abolished, Army ROTC enrollment fell to 33,000, or about one-sixth of its 1967 peak of 177,000. Today the number is 65,000. Air Force ROTC has climbed to 22,500, only 10% below its Viet Nam peak. The military is still absent from some private colleges, including Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown and Colgate, all of which ejected ROTC in the Viet Nam era. But Navy ROTC now has a waiting list of 30 schools that want to join the 55 other campuses that train midshipmen. Army ROTC has grown from a low of 250 schools to 279, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown and most major state universities.

One campus where the ROTC's fortunes have improved is Princeton. There, a third of the 3,000 undergraduates were enrolled in ROTC during the early 1950s, but the number began to dwindle after the Korean War. The faculty voted to strip academic credit from military courses in 1970, causing the Navy and Air Force to withdraw. The Army, which held the ivied fort alone, has seen its enrollment grow by 10% annually. Now the roster numbers 96, including ten women.

Some rules have been relaxed to make ROTC students feel more at ease. Male cadets need not cut their hair short, and uniforms are required only during field exercises. But the telling development is that the students no longer feel they have to camouflage their armed forces connections. Says Senior Kim Thompson, 22, Princeton's first female cadet commander: "As a freshman, I would never dine in my eating club if I didn't have time to change out of my fatigues. Now I'll go in uniform." Thompson noted a sharp drop in the razzing she got after the U.S. hostages were taken in Tehran. ROTC, she feels, has also benefited from student enthusiasm for fitness and outdoor life. Says she: "We've had more civilian participation in ROTC activities like rafting, rappelling and the marathon."

The Princeton program is headed by Lieut. Colonel John Pope, 43, whose credits include a Ph.D. in education from the University of California at Berkeley and experience as a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam. Pope is quietly lobbying to restore academic credit to some ROTC courses. Although the faculty remains opposed, Pope argues: "If programs like dance, theater, painting and arts can go for credit, there should be room for credit courses in the cause and effect of war." Most oth er ROTC schools grant the courses at least some credit; Northwestern does so for about half of its Navy ROTC courses.

Financial pressure is another reason for the growth of ROTC. At Northwestern, tuition, room and board cost $8,285. Observes the school's commanding officer, Captain Manuel B. Sousa: "If students here can keep their noses above water academically and pass the physical, it's virtually guaranteed that we can put them on full scholarship." Nationally, 10% of the Army's ROTC cadets receive full scholarships for up to four years. All the services pay for attendance at advanced summer camps; upper-level ROTC members also earn up to $1,000 annually for their campus training. Scholarship students are required to serve after college for a minimum of four years, while other commissioned ROTC graduates owe up to three full-time years to the military.

Another boon to ROTC is the fact that patriotism is big again among many students. At the University of Delaware, Cadet Peter Pfeiffer explains, "I thought the Army was a joke. It sounds corny, but now I want to serve my country. I've seen there are a lot of places where you can't do what you want." The program's resurgence is welcomed by the military: 70% of the Army's 98,000 officers came up through ROTC, as did about 30% of the Air Force's 359 generals.

For still others, though, the most welcome fact about ROTC'S return has less to do with patriotism or practicality than with sound democratic principles. Observes University of Delaware President E. Arthur Trabant: "More students have come to the conclusion I came to many years ago, that the best army is a citizen army. The ROTC program contributes to that.''

By Kenneth M. Pierce. Reported by Don Sider/Washington and James Wilde/Princeton.

With reporting by Don Sider, James Wilde

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