UPDATE: The Stanford University faculty senate voted this week to form a committee to "investigate Stanford's role in preparing students for leadership in the military, including potential relations with ROTC," a spokeswoman for the university said. The committee would report back to the senate in the next academic year.
Could the days of a 40-year ROTC ban at Stanford University soon be over?
The Faculty Senate will take action today on a report from two professors who argue that bringing the Reserve Officers' Training Corps back to Stanford would be good for the university, students, the military and the nation, according to Stanford's Web site.
The two presenters are William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997, a professor and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and David Kennedy, a professor emeritus of history.
It's not clear exactly what action the senate might take on the report, but Kennedy hopes the panel will take a step toward reinstating the program – a move that would require plenty of planning and discussion, he said in an e-mail.
During World War II, an estimated 50 percent of undergraduate men at Stanford participated in ROTC. The postwar peak was in 1956, when 1,100 students were officer trainees, according to a 2002 article in Stanford Magazine.
But the tables turned at colleges across the country during the anti-war movement. In 1968, arsonists set fire to Stanford's Naval ROTC headquarters, just one in a string of attacks across the nation on the college-based military program, which trains officers in all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.
In 1970, after several student and faculty votes, Stanford stripped the courses of academic credit, eliminated faculty rank for military instructors and removed the program's departmental status in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford's Web site said.
Similar bans went into effect at other elite universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia and Tufts.
Now, Stanford students who want to participate in ROTC can receive military training at one of three other campuses – UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University or San Jose State University – while working toward their undergraduate degrees at Stanford. A few ROTC courses are taught on Stanford's campus. A total of 11 Stanford students participate in ROTC.
Anyone can enroll in ROTC at Stanford, but the military also offers competitive scholarships. According to Stanford's Web site, the ROTC scholarship pays for all tuition for four years. In addition, students receive a $1200 yearly book stipend and a $300-$500 monthly stipend, depending on the student's year.
But students don't get credit toward their Stanford degrees for these classes, and the courses don't count toward full-time status.
Stanford isn't the only campus possibly reconsidering its ROTC ban.
Kennedy, the Stanford professor, said part of the energy behind the push to repeal the ban is an assumption that the military will end it's "don't ask, don't tell" policy soon.
That's also the case at Harvard, where the Boston Globe reports the university will likely reinstate ROTC once the military's policy toward gays is abolished.
The New York Times reported that President Barack Obama decried the ROTC ban at Columbia University during a campaign visit.
“The notion that young people here at Columbia, or anywhere, in any university, aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake,” Obama said.
Still, the 2002 Stanford Magazine story indicated that, at least at that time, there remained some resistance on campus to having ROTC.
Barton Bernstein, a Stanford history professor who helped lead the 1969 movement against ROTC, told the magazine that "ROTC represents a group of pseudo-faculty preparing students for war and training them to kill, and that is fundamentally unacceptable at a university."
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