Soldiers and Students

In the dead of night on April 9, 1969, Michael Kazin ’70, styling himself as a modern Martin Luther, walked up to Loeb House, the home of then-University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28, and tacked a list of demands on his door as 300 fellow protesters looked on. At the top of their list was the expulsion of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

The Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, led by Kazin, had gathered earlier that night in Lowell Lecture Hall to debate the takeover of a University building, the culmination of months-long protests against the Vietnam War and the University’s relationship with the military. By the following afternoon, the situation would reach a head as hundreds of protesters forced their way into University Hall, throwing out top administrators in protest of the University’s continued recognition of the program designed to train students for active military service.

In the intervening decades since ROTC left campus, the organization’s presence on campus has remained low-profile and symbolic of the University’s often tense relationship with the military.

But in March, Harvard made a break with the antagonism of recent years and moved to officially recognize Navy ROTC. As University President Drew G. Faust signed an agreement with Navy Secretary Ray E. Mabus in a stately room of Loeb House, Harvard’s history with ROTC appeared to have come full circle as the corps was welcomed back feet from where the leftists of the 1960s had officially demanded its expulsion.

But outside Loeb a new generation of protesters had gathered. Unlike their counterparts 40 years earlier, they are opposed to the presence of ROTC on campus because of what they see as the military’s discriminatory policies toward trans identified individuals rather than the categorical opposition to the military that characterized the dissidents of the ’60s.

Over the last half century, changing political circumstances have altered Harvard’s relationship with the armed forces as anti-militarism has become unacceptable and any criticism of the military have focused on specific policies. Within this context, the Harvard community’s relationship to the military has morphed from contentious opposition during the ’60s, to conservative reaction during the ’70s and ’80s, to one of relative indifference and apathy today.

A PATRIOTIC DECADE

When Capt. Paul E. Mawn USNR (Ret.) ’63, the current president of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, entered Harvard in 1959, the presence of the military on campus was a fact of life.

Harvard’s relationship with the military stretches back to the American Revolution, and as late as World War II the University was actively hosting a Naval officer’s school. In the 1950s, the military still commanded a great deal of respect and a relatively positive profile on campus, and, as Mawn put it, membership in ROTC was as unremarkable as membership in the Harvard band.

The financial incentives associated with the program also explained a portion of its popularity on campus.

For Malcolm T. Hill Jr. ’59, the president of the Harvard ROTC Alumni Fund, the existence of the NROTC Holloway Plan—a merit scholarship program that provided free room and board in return for military service—attracted him to ROTC. As Hill explained, it was less competitive to get into Harvard than to receive a Holloway grant when he applied to Harvard.

For many, the continued existence of the draft—as America moved from combat in Korea to Vietnam—furthered interest in ROTC as joining the program was a way to put off service and ensure a higher position after leaving school.

“I facetiously say that I dodged the draft by going into active duty,” Mawn says.

And these incentives reached across campus—in Mawn’s class, 100 of 1200 eligible students participated in one of the three branches of ROTC.

But the acceptance of ROTC went beyond practical concerns. The memory of World War II was still fresh in the minds of students, and many, like Mawn, were children of veterans. Then, the military was more than a career, and ROTC was more than a scholarship or activity. At that time, the military was something to be respected rather than reviled.

THE BREAKING POINT

But by 1969, everything had changed. As the conflict in Vietnam entered its fourteenth year and changes in the draft rules prevented ROTC from serving as a viable deferral of service, anti-military protests swept across college campuses, including Harvard.

In the years before the April 9 takeover of University Hall, tensions between student demonstrators, administrators, and the military’s place on campus had grown. In 1967, 800 students protested the appearance of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara at the Institute of Politics, and the following year 300 protesters imprisoned a recruiter from Dow Chemical, which manufactured napalm for use in Vietnam, in a campus building. In December before the University Hall takeover, 100 students organized a sit-in at Paine Hall after being barred from Faculty meetings debating ROTC.

Already, the administration began to budge. In February, the Faculty voted to withdraw academic credit for ROTC. By that April, Kazin and other leaders of the SDS had decided that it was time to take bold action against the administration.

“It was not only the war they objected to but the whole establishment with a ‘capital E’ that was responsible for this,” Government Professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, who has been on the faculty since 1962, says. “Part of this was the feeling that the whole country was too militaristic. It wasn’t just that this was a wrong war in the wrong place.”

According to Kazin, anti-Vietnam protesters at Harvard made ROTC a central issue because it represented a concrete way to tie the administration to the unpopular war effort, a symbol of the University’s complicity.

With this in mind, the SDS, in a move consciously reminiscent of Luther’s stand at the church of Wittenberg, tacked their demands to President Pusey’s door, setting off the following two weeks of protests.

Eight days after students seized University Hall, the Faculty voted to relegate ROTC to the status of a regular extracurricular organization, effectively cutting it off from necessary resources. The faculty vote was overwhelmingly in favor the resolution, and it passed by a 385-25 margin.

FADING FROM THE SCENE

In the years immediately following ROTC’s departure from Harvard, the military, along with the opposition to it, faded into the background of campus debate.

When Michael M. Segal ’76, a current leader of Advocates for Harvard ROTC, came to campus there was no way for Harvard students to participate in ROTC. Shannon Hall, the former headquarters of the Harvard ROTC detachment had been converted into a daycare center.

But by the time Segal had graduated, the standoff eased and Harvard students could enroll in ROTC classes and training at MIT beginning in 1976. Harvard alumni have footed the bill for Harvard cadets for much of this time. This arrangement has remained relatively unchanged over the intervening three decades.

Meanwhile, changes in the American political landscape tempered the anti-military sentiment that drove ROTC off campus. As Mansfield explains, the conservative backlash of the later decades of the 20th century—much of it a consequence of the very movement that severed Harvard’s ties with ROTC—led to an increasing acceptance of the military.

Over time, the debate over ROTC shifted to a focus on the military’s recruitment practices, which under “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” prohibited gays and lesbians from openly serving in the military.

For pro-ROTC groups, this represented a significant shift away from the anti-militarism of the sixties.

“The people who were appealing for gay rights had essentially a patriotic cause,” Segal says. “They weren’t an anti-military movement.”

Meanwhile, the lack of an official ROTC presence at Harvard kept it from the campus consciousness.

While Seth W. Moulton ’01 did not participate in ROTC during his time at Harvard, he remembers his friends’ surprise when he announced in the spring of his senior year that he intended to enlist after graduation. Then, the military was just not seen as a viable career option.

“Making the decision to serve is hard, and when all your friends are going to New York anyway, it’s just very convenient to go work in an investment bank,” Moulton says.

RESURGENCE

A few months after Moulton enlisted, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and Pentagon once again shifted the discourse around the military at Harvard. In some ways, Moulton explains, his friends’ increased interest in enlisting after September 11, despite their surprise at his choice just a few months before, vindicated his decision to join.

Like WWII before it resulted in increased respect and admiration for the military, the outpouring of patriotism stemming from the attacks of 9/11 changed the military’s profile in this country.

“We grew up in the shadow of 9/11, and I joined the army because of 9/11,” Army Cadet Christopher W. Higgins ’11 says. “It’s something that was really ingrained in us as a generation.”

Despite an increased respect for the military, its presence on campus remained minimal after 9/11. In all three programs, roughly 20 Harvard undergraduates across all four grade levels participate in ROTC every year—down from around 100 students per class in the two immediate decades following WWII.

Current ROTC cadets at Harvard say they feel that their peers’ attitudes toward their decision to join the corps range from support to relative indifference but note that they see no open hostility.

“It’s kind of like benign neglect,” Higgins says.

Much of this trend away from open disagreement with the military as an institution represents the flip side of the patriotism sparked by the events of September 2001. While it has become socially acceptable to oppose the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, the slogan “support our troops” has become an unassailable maxim of American life.

“What we tend to do is to equate our respect for the people who were affected by 9/11 with this idea that the military is not open to criticism,” explains Diane H. Mazur, a former Air Force officer and a professor of law at the University of Florida. “Forty years ago there was much more social latitude to openly disagree.”

Amid this relatively tacit acceptance of the military, the debate over ROTC at Harvard during the past decade has shifted toward ensuring that more people are to join the program, rather than disagreement over foreign policy or outright pacifism. Now, opposition to the military’s presence is predicated on the ideal that military service is something to be lauded and open to everyone and that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and restrictions on trans identified individuals to serve violates this principle.

Pacifism, or any other variant of anti-militarism, seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Today, English Professor Louis Menand shows home-shot footage of the 1969 Harvard protests to his perennially popular class U.S. in the World 23: “Art and Thought in the Cold War.” But for many of his students, this protest ethic is a foreign concept.

“They got beat up by the cops, they got arrested,” Menand says. “Students are surprised to see how active and engaged students were in those days.”

—Staff writer Stephanie B. Garlock can be reached at sgarlock@college.harvard.edu.