ROTC Delays Office Request

A potentially bruising battle over the future of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at Harvard was postponed this year after the chief of the Army’s battalion at MIT backed away from plans to request office space in the Yard.

Lt. Col. Brian L. Baker, whose Paul Revere Battalion at MIT includes cadets from Harvard, said last fall that he would ask University President Lawrence H. Summers to allow the Army to post a captain and a sergeant on campus.

“I will meet with President Summers this spring to discuss this very issue and intend to request he allow/enable us to take this next step, necessary to double our enrollment by 2008,” Baker told Advocates for Harvard ROTC, a group led by alumni and retired military officers, in a November 2004 speech.

But more than six months later, Baker has yet to bring his request to the University president.

This morning, Summers will attend a Tercentenary Theater ceremony at which seven senior cadets from Harvard will receive their commissions—three from the Army, three from the Navy, and one from the Air Force.

Summers has emerged as an outspoken backer of the officer training program since his arrival at Mass. Hall in 2001. But, last July, he said in a private meeting that he was “not prepared” to make the argument for ROTC space on campus, according to Baker.

Some faculty members are likely to object to any attempt to establish a ROTC office at Harvard. “I wouldn’t wish military service in Iraq on anyone,” Paul F. Hoffman, the Hooper professor of geology, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “So I am opposed to military recruitment on campus or anywhere else for the purpose of perpetuating the occupation.”

Baker said last month—after the Faculty passed a resolution in March expressing its “lack of confidence” in Summers’ leadership—that the Army would not issue a request for an office at Harvard.

“[Summers] has quite a bit on his plate now, so it’s probably not optimal to bring that to him now,” Baker told The Crimson in an interview.

“I just assume give the man some breathing room. He’ll find an opportunity to help us,” Baker said.

Baker, who will retire this year after a quarter-century career in the Army, has led the battalion at MIT for the past half-decade.

Harvard has not hosted an officer training program since 1971, two years after the Faculty, expressing its opposition to the Vietnam War, voted to bar ROTC from using campus space.

Student cadets subsequently traveled to MIT to participate in ROTC, with Harvard picking up part of the tab for the program’s costs.

But, in 1993, the Faculty voted to cut off funding for ROTC to protest the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Now, three anonymous alums pay Harvard’s “fair share” of the MIT program’s cost, according to Baker.

Baker said last month that the Pentagon has no plans to station a full-fledged battalion at Harvard. “It’s too much of an investment,” Baker said.

In an interview with The Crimson last week, Summers declined to comment on his meetings with Baker. But in the past he has made no secret of his support for ROTC.

In January 2002, he blasted the anonymous donor arrangement with MIT as an “uncomfortable, back-door policy inconsistent with transparency.”

And that June, Summers became the first Harvard president to attend a ROTC commissioning ceremony since 1969.

For senior cadets about to ship off to far-flung locales, Summers’ consistent presence at the commissioning ceremonies is “very encouraging,” said soon-to-be Second Lt. Elliott N. Neal ’05, who has been assigned to the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy.

“It shows that Harvard respects thae individuals who will be going into the uniformed services,” said Kyle E. Scherer ’05, who plans to participate in today’s ceremony but will not receive his officer commission until he completes a leadership-training program next month.

Neal said that having an Army officer on campus might allow Harvard cadets to conduct some exercises—such as uniform inspections or drilling practice—without trekking to MIT.

“I’m in favor of anything that would help students participate in ROTC because it’s the best thing I’ve done at Harvard,” Neal said.

But some say a ROTC office on campus might prove to be a double-edged sword for the armed services.

“I think the space might give a particularly vivid focus to demonstrations against the war on Iraq and against the U.S. government’s revolting class-based treatment of its enlisted personnel,” said John Womack Jr. ’59, an outspoken faculty critic of U.S. foreign policy, who is Bliss professor of Latin American history and economics.

Four Ivy League schools—Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, and Princeton—currently allow ROTC programs to train on campus. Columbia’s University Senate, a student-faculty policy-making body that makes recommendations to the Board of Trustees, last month overwhelmingly rejected a resolution to restore ROTC at the university.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.