ROTC Makes A Stormy Exit

LAST FALL Harvard's political Left and Right mobilized their constituencies around an issue that the Faculty had presumably resolved four years earlier. The issue--whether Harvard should maintain units of the Reserve Officers Training Corps--had been resurrected on the heels of the previous semester when only a few students were present on campus. At that time President Bok, speaking before alumni gathered in balmy Cambridge to observe the annual Commencement rites, said: "I do not believe that our record and our conscience can be fully clear until we manifest our willingness to entertain an ROTC program on terms compatible with our usual institutional standards."

Bok's surprise statement and the enthusiastic support it received from alumni led to immediate speculation that he had plans to urge the Faculty to reconsider ROTC. But a month later Bok said he had no such plans. "I would like to feel sure we had made an unbiased judgment," he said. "But I have no strong motivation to get it back. I don't know if enough students are interested to warrant bringing it up, and if no one on the Faculty wants to discuss it, I'm not going to push them."

So last fall 2500 students signed a New American Movement-sponsored petition asking the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life to sponsor a referendum on the ROTC question. The CHUL subsequently rejected that request--unanimously. No one answered a Harvard Republican Club call for people interested in joining a new ROTC program. The issue fizzled.

But the present status of ROTC on campus--no ROTC whatsoever--was not attained by a quiet faze-out. While ROTC had led a quiet existence at Harvard since 1916, by 1969 it had become a major issue, one which led to the largest student strike in Harvard history.

The drive to change ROTC's status in the University began in the fall of '68 when countless committees began to debate the merits of academically- accredited Reserve Officer Training Corps units. In early October the Harvard Undergraduate Council (HUC) proposed a plan for curtailing ROTC's privileges, including the removal of academic credit from all ROTC courses. But the resolution had no formal influence, so the faculty-less HUC began to work toward placing the issue on the Faculty docket. Edward T. Wilcox, director of General Education, offered to introduce the HUC resolution to the Faculty.

Although HUC members wanted to secure a spot for their resolution on the docket primarily as an effort to establish a precedent of regular Faculty consideration of similar student-initiated resolutions, they also wanted to form a united front of student government groups against a credited ROTC program. The HUC appeared before the Student-Faculty Advisory Committee (SFAC), and that appearance prompted two other groups--the Council for Educational Policy (CEP) and the Harvard-Radcliffe Policy Committee (HRPC)--to debate the ROTC issue.

The CEP held quiet court but failed to produce any conclusions based upon its hearings into the matter. In early November, however, the HRPC called for the abolition of ROTC's academic status.

While the HRPC and HUC recommendations were similar in their conclusions, they attacked ROTC from different premises. The HUC claimed that ROTC courses did not meet Harvard's standard academic criteria: that their content was flabby. HRPC contended that ROTC courses that it demanded of all other academic courses, and since ROTC courses had pre-professional orientations aimed at producing officers, the HRPC argued that ROTC courses should be removed from Harvard's liberal arts curriculum.

Near the end of November, the SFAC considered the first of the proposals that dealt with ROTC, the one that had been formulated by SDS--total expulsion of the program. That motion was easily defeated. The SDS position was that Harvard, for moral and political reasons, should refuse to allow ROTC on campus in any form. SDS, like the other organizations, lacked a formal vehicle to bring its proposals before the Faculty. But on November 20, the organization announced that Hilary Putnam, professor of Philosophy, would present its case for total expulsion.

One week before the Faculty was scheduled to consider ROTC, the SFAC presented its resolution, an amalgamation of the HUC and HRPC proposals. The resolution--to be offered to the Faculty by Rogers Albritton, professor of Philosophy--put forth a five-point plan for ending ROTC's academic status:

Denying academic credit to ROTC courses;

Removing appointments from the instructors;

Excising ROTC descriptions from the catalogues;

Ending rent-free building use; and,

Giving Harvard scholarship money to any students who might lose their ROTC scholarships because of ROTC's changed status.

Through the fall, the CEP had heard testimony from nearly every group that had any connection with ROTC. Only the Harvard Young Republicans claimed that the CEP had ignored them. And despite the political nature of some of the testimony it heard, the CEP remained concerned primarily with academic principles: whether ROTC courses deserved credit, and what effect the removal of credit would have on the ROTC program.

The CEP resolution that evolved would have forced all ROTC courses and professors to reapply individually for academic status through any of Harvard's existing departments. James Q. Wilson, professor of Government, who was to present the CEP recommendation to the Faculty, suggested that the plan would be as effective as the SFAC plan in abolishing credit. After all, he asked, "What department would approve the courses?" But the comment reportedly made by Col. Robert H. Pell, professor of Military Science and director of Army ROTC, that the CEP resolution "couldn't have pleased me more" made ROTC opponents uneasy about Wilson's claim.

The Faculty vote was slated for December 12. But the Paine Hall sit-in, in which over 100 students attempted to gain entrance to the Faculty meeting, upstaged the scheduled debate on ROTC for more than five weeks. After disposing of Paine Hall punishments, the Faculty turned its attention back to the ROTC issue.

On February 4, with nine specially-invited students present (the first "open" Faculty meeting in Harvard's history), the Faculty voted, 207-125, to approve the SFAC proposal, with-drawing academic credit from all ROTC courses. The SFAC resolution made no mention of the possibility of according extracurricular status to ROTC, a move supported by the Corporation. And at that time Franklin L. Ford, then dean of the Faculty, declined to speculate on ROTC's future at Harvard. But Col. Pell said that the Faculty's decision "would ultimately drive ROTC from the campus."

Two weeks later the Corporation approved the Faculty's request that academic credit be withdrawn from ROTC courses and that appointments for ROTC instructors be revoked, but it voted to negotiate new contracts with the Defense Department to keep ROTC units operating at Harvard.

Several groups charged that the Corporation had, in fact, overruled or attempted to circumvent the Faculty proposal to eliminate ROTC privileges at the university. They demanded that ROTC be abolished immediately,. Amid protest, President Pusey and other Ivy League presidents tried ardently to negotiate new contracts with the Defense Department.

And then the confrontations really began. The climax came on April 9 when several hundred anti-ROTC demonstrators occupied University Hall and ejected all administration officials and staff members, some of them forcibly.

Then, on April 17, three days after the Soldiers Field meeting, the Faculty resolved that any Harvard ROTC unit should be no more than an ordinary extracurricular activity "with no special privileges or facilities granted either by contract or informal agreement." The Bruner Resolution, adopted by a 385-25 margin, provided that "existing contracts inconsistent with-this principle be terminated as soon as legally possible and that scholarship funds be provided where need is created by this decision."

So ROTC made its departure from Harvard leaving behind only a few remnants of its 53-year life here. The possible return of ROTC may have sparked some debate last fall, but for the most part the issue died a peaceful death. No current class can look back with first-hand experience on the days when ROTC was last a burning issue at this university