Afghanistan Was Lost in the Halls of Harvard The 40-year ROTC ban sent a deeper message: that American civilization isn’t worth defending. By Ruth R. Wisse
Postmortems on Afghanistan are still focused on failures of the U.S. military and government, but before moving on, we should explore the more fundamental causes of this debacle.
Maybe because I have spent my life in education, I have always valued the observation, attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The qualities developed in those British schoolboys produced the soldiering that defeated Napoleon’s forces. Since armies are typically made up of young people who go straight from school to the battlefield, the traits and habits necessary for winning wars must be already ingrained in those we expect to fight them. Afghanistan was lost in the halls of Harvard.
Harvard was the first college to bring the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, to campus in 1916. ROTC was established by the U.S. National Defense Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson. Its purpose, then as now, was to encourage college students to undergo military training as potential officers. Many campus plaques honor Harvard students who fought for their country, but ROTC came under attack in 1968 as part of opposition to the Vietnam War, the draft and the “military-industrial complex.” As the war became unpopular, antagonism toward the military on campus grew.
Both the draft and American involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973. One might have expected the voluntary ROTC to flourish, given that the U.S. still had plenty of enemies, some with dangerous weaponry and aims. Instead, rather than encourage outstanding students to undertake military training as part of their civic responsibility, faculty at Harvard and elsewhere took the lead in banishing ROTC from campus.
By the time I arrived at Harvard to teach in 1993, the ostensible justification for keeping ROTC off campus had shifted from objections to its educational function to rejection of the Clinton-era policy toward gay soldiers. Rather than legitimately opposing “don’t ask, don’t tell” through the political process, faculty used it as moral camouflage for their continuing war on military service.
The finer students saw through it. I fondly recall a student forum in 1999 where a self-described “gay libertarian” mocked the university’s policy, saying that the next pretext would be that recruits were not allowed freedom of speech.
But student conscience and conscientiousness were no match for opposition from the small number of faculty ideologues in the humanities and social sciences—the ones who determine a university’s political agenda because the rest of us are too indifferent or weak to stop them. In 1999 they passed a resolution preventing Harvard even from paying the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Harvard’s few remaining ROTC students were being sent for training. To get around this resolution, the administration asked alumni to foot the bill.
For almost 40 years, Harvard kept ROTC off campus, until the military no longer cared about reinstating it. With the training went the courses related to military history and security studies. The school’s only remaining military historian, Stephen P. Rosen, is approaching retirement.
Just as the presence of ROTC inculcated respect for military service, so did an anti-ROTC atmosphere deliver the message that a flawed America wasn’t worth defending. The message was clear: Harvard students are too good for military service. Leave national defense to the farm boys and those who don’t make it to an elite college. Forty years of such scorn for the military will bring low any democracy.
ROTC is back on Harvard’s campus now. But more than mere acceptance is needed. Students must be offered an education that demonstrates the exceptional merits of their country and civilization, and gives them the intellectual tools to defend it.
In a welcoming message this year, Harvard’s President Lawrence Bacow told students, “Climate change is the most consequential threat facing humanity.” Much as I respect his leadership, I believe that the university’s dereliction of democratic duty is a far greater and more immediate threat to humanity—one that is in his power to reverse.
Ms. Wisse is a professor emerita at Harvard University. Her memoir, “Free as a Jew,” is being released this week.
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