A Noose for ROTC

THE CASE against giving Harvard course credit for ROTC training is easy to construct. Instructors in the program hold regular Corporation appointments but unlike their colleagues are selected by an outside body--the military--rather than the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Until this fall, security clearances were required for some ROTC classes and despite dribbles of reform, the courses still follow standardized formulae promulgated in Washington. ROTC is essentially pre-professional training for the military and thus does not belong in the curriculum of an undergraduate liberal arts program.

These familiar arguments were given an unexpected an unintended boost this week by Colonel Robert H. Pell, professor of military science and director of the Army ROTC program here. Col. Pell's personal defense of ROTC for credit is part of a fact sheet on the program the Harvard Undergraduate Council is circulating in the dining halls, and his justification of the program is far more damning of its academic merits than any of the rhetoric of ROTC critics.

"The Senior Division Army ROTC curriculum is designed to produce a specific product...," Col. Pell begins, sharply defining a manipulative, mechanistic goal for ROTC courses, hard to reconcile with any definition of a liberal arts education. He explains further that a young man will gain from ROTC "the dedication and skills he must have to be a good Army officer"--again evoking Sears Roebuck management training rather than a college. Twice, in fact, Pell weakens his case by comparing ROTC to other professional disciplines--medicine, law, and business--which Harvard, except for a handful of accounting, engineering, and pre-med courses, has kept out of its undergraduate program.

If ROTC loses its academic status, Pell argues, it will be "derogated and reduced to the level of an extracurricular game." Again he misinterprets the college program which is designed to allow students with career interests--politics or journalism, for instance--plenty of time to pursue them outside the regular course structure. It is not clear why those who want to be officers in the military could not do the same.

THE POSSIBILITY that dis-credited, ROTC might withdraw the substantial financial aid it provides students here is raised in Pell's statement, but he gives no evidence to back the threat. Scholarship money is still being given at Boston University, which made ROTC non-credit last year, and Captain Robert Moriarity, director of Naval ROTC at Harvard has told the HUC that scholarships in that program would most likely continue regardless of its status.

Part of the heat being generated against ROTC this fall undoubtedly comes from the war and the gut reaction against a military uniform it has induced. Pell accuses critics of the program of objecting on political rather than academic and administrative grounds, but his own defense of the program is ultimately political too. A supply of well-trained officers is necessary to "the hard-core national interest," he says, and without that supply, "the survival of the nation in a cruel world through the maintenance of adequate deterrent strength will be seriously jeopardized."

Take away the hawkish bombast, and Pell might have a point--if there really were a movement here to drive ROTC from the campus. But the HUC, HPC, and SFAC, the three student organizations at work on the issue, seem unlikely to recommend that the University sever all relations with ROTC. It would be hard to argue that the student who wants to join an officer's training program should not be allowed to do so. But it is just as indefensible to maintain, as Col. Pell by implication does, that Harvard should be in the business of steering her sons into military management with the lure of a little course credit.