Larry Summers Goes to War?
You have to love any newspaper article beginning thusly: "It's time for Harvard University President Larry Summers to pick a fight."
Writing in the Boston Herald, Virginia Buckingham argues that Summers has dropped the ball by failing to push for the reinstitution of ROTC on the Harvard campus. (At the moment, Harvard students who enroll in ROTC travel to MIT for their training.)
Faced with recruiting shortfalls, the military needs officers, Buckingham says. And Harvard students lose out on a life-changing patriotic experience by not supporting the military.
Buckingham's article is both right and wrong. It's wrong in the sense that Summers has in the past pushed for the restoration of ROTC at Harvard, particularly in the weeks after 9/11. She's right in that Summers, after getting lots of credit for his rhetoric from American conservatives never actually did anything to bring ROTC back. Doing so would require a vote of the faculty, and Summers has never chosen to expend his political capital on such a vote. Accurately or not, that decision has created the appearance that Summers wants to get credit for talking up military service without raising a sweat on its behalf.
I'm of two minds about this. The reason Harvard doesn't have its own ROTC program is because of the military's anti-gay discrimination; Harvard bans recruitment on its campus by any employer that discriminates. I think that's a principled stand, and I support it.
At the same time, I do think that there's real value in military service, and that the exclusion of the military does separate Harvard from the national mainstream in some unfortunate ways. It also exposes Harvard to charges of being unpatriotic, which, in my opinion, it is not.
There is, of course, an easy solution. The military has a severe recruiting shortage; the military bans gays from service. Hmmm.
But since the military doesn't seem likely to change its policy, what to do? I honestly don't have an answer for that. Do you?
