The military is hip again

Rico says the 1940s was probably the last time the military was really welcome at Ivy League schools, but Alan Feuer has an article in The New York Times about a change of heart at Columbia:

More than four decades after Columbia University, the heart of the Vietnam-era student movement, banned ROTC from campus in a moment of 1960s antimilitary rage, the university Senate voted overwhelmingly to support efforts to bring the group back.
The vote— 51 to 17, with one abstention— came in support of a Senate resolution to “explore mutually beneficial relationships with the armed forces of the United States, including participation in the programs of the Reserve Officers Training Corps.” It followed a series of sometimes venomous campus meetings, and found its impetus in President Obama’s signing three months ago of a bill to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality.

In the popular eye, and in history texts, Columbia’s relations with the military have been more or less defined by the decision in 1969 to ban ROTC. The move came at the end of a period of pitched student activism— the Spirit of ’68, as it was known— that included student strikes and the occupation of Hamilton Hall, a main academic building. The sense of generational turnabout in the Senate vote was not lost on the students of today.
“So often when people mention Columbia, the Spirit of ’68 comes up; it always resonates,” said Kenny Durrell, 21, a student senator who voted against the resolution. “Now we’ve contradicted that, or at least we’ve shown a willingness to re-examine how the military interacts with students and with bodies of higher education.”
Six years ago, the Senate, which helps set university policy, voted 53 to 10 to deny campus access to the ROTC program. This time, the decisive issue was the move to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell”, which was widely seen as violating Columbia’s policy of nondiscrimination.
Almost upon the announcement of the repeal law, a group of nine senators— four students and five faculty members— created a Taskforce on Military Engagement, which held three town-hall-style meetings that occasionally turned bitter. At one of the meetings, a wounded military veteran was heckled briefly by the crowd.
“What you had was a couple of groups who don’t normally talk to one another,” said James H. Applegate, an astronomy professor and member of the task force. “There was a large presence of veterans, but also of students whose perspective was that the U.S. was an imperial, war-monger, colonial oppressor.”
Some opponents of the resolution criticized the process preceding the vote as rushed and ineffectual. Sean Udell, the senior class president, said a task force set up to debate a universitywide smoking ban, for instance, had taken almost two years to do its work, not the few months taken by the military engagement group. “Clearly there was a lot of pressure coming from the administration to get this done,” Mr. Udell said. “To me, what this says is that there’s an agenda here.”
In early March, officials at Harvard announced that they would formally recognize Naval ROTC, forty years after the program was banned there. Since the signing of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal law, other universities have publicly expressed a similar interest in bringing back the armed forces officers’ group, which has units at more than three hundred campuses nationwide.
For reasons both of history and institutional character, however, none has the importance of Columbia, home to a particularly vigorous chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), some of whose most militant members helped to form the left-wing radical group the Weathermen.
One former Weatherman, Brian Flanagan, who still lives in the Columbia area, was unrepentantly critical of the military and the ROTC in a brief interview. “The U.S. armed forces are a blight on the planet,” Mr. Flanagan said. “I don’t support soldiers; I think they’re war criminals. So obviously, I’m against R ROTC coming back.”
Before the Vietnam War, Columbia had a long and mostly cordial rapport with the armed forces. Dwight D. Eisenhower once served as its president, and crucial research for the Manhattan Project was conducted in Pupin Hall. Columbia provided more young officers during World War Two than the Naval Academy did, said N. Rudy Rickner, a former Marine Corps pilot and the departing president of a campus veterans group. “The conversation between the military and the university has traveled through an arc,” said Mr. Rickner, a business school student. “Veterans and people who come here to study have not always had the kind of interaction they should have had for the last thirty years. Now they will.”
At least, they might. It remains unclear if the armed forces will accept an invitation to return to campus. Officials from the Army and Navy could not be reached for comment.
At the very least, the Senate vote has “taken the military out of the realm of the taboo,” said Ron Mazor, a member of the task force and a second-year law school student who voted for the resolution.
Professor Applegate said: “This is a culmination of something going back several years. Back in the ’60s, students kicked ROTC off campus. But, in 2011, students brought them back.”