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Now That DADT is DEAD, will Harvard Allow ROTC?
Repeal of the Defense Department's "don't ask, don't tell" policy ends a long and sorry history of discrimination against gays and lesbians in military service.
Wait. I thought Clinton signed that into law. It was DOD all along?
It was Congress, not DoD.
It may also herald the end of another lamentable episode in civil-military relations: the ouster of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) from some of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities.
They'd be more prestigious if they hadn't been so obviously anti-military.

Ivy League institutions kicked ROTC off campus in the 1960s - partly the result of a faculty protest against the Vietnam War, partly to appease sometimes-violent antiwar students. Universities generally did not formally ban ROTC but stripped it of autonomy and for-credit status, without which the program could not operate. Vietnam ended, but the de facto ban did not; instead, it found a new rationale when Congress passed "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) in 1993.
Between 1975 and 1993, they were just anti-military, then they found a new cause to hang on their lefty position.
The campus ban was the wrong way to make a valid point: Though operating under not a DOD directive, but a flawed law, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines defended all Americans, gay or straight. Over four decades, the ban contributed to corrosive estrangement between two important American subcultures - elite academia and the military officer corps. It was hypocritical, too. Some institutions that did not welcome ROTC took financial aid that their students earned for participating in the program at other schools. During the 2008 presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain supported a return of ROTC to Ivy League campuses.

Thus, repeal of DADT offers the Ivies and similar schools an opportunity to rejoin the national mainstream. They should seize it - as the presidents of Yale, Harvard and Columbia have already implied they would.
I ain't holding my breath.
To be sure, institutions separated for so many years may find it difficult, at first, to work together. Some in both the military and academia have grown comfortable with the status quo and may seek new reasons to perpetuate it. Perhaps the least convincing argument against restoration of Ivy League ROTC is that there won't be enough student interest to warrant the expense. We have a broader notion of cost-effectiveness and a higher opinion of these young scholars' willingness to serve. Leaders in both the Defense Department and the universities should insist that they get the chance.
Fairly fair, for the WaPo, I thought.
Posted by: Bobby 2010-12-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=312445