REVIEW & OUTLOOK
A Tale of Two Columbias
The patriotic and the politically correct.
On April 28, First Lieutenant William A. Edens was killed in Tal Afar, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device destroyed the armored vehicle in which he was traveling. Four other U.S. soldiers died with him. Lieutenant Edens, who was 29, is survived by his wife, Christina, and by his parents. At his memorial service last week, he was remembered as "a great man, an amazing soldier and a wonderful friend" by First Lieutenant Joshua Grenard, a classmate of Eden's in the ROTC program of the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Now consider a different Columbia: Columbia University, in New York City. On Friday, the university senate voted by a 53-10 margin, with five abstentions, against a resolution to re-establish an ROTC program on campus. Prominent in this roll call of dishonor was President Lee Bollinger, who voted against, and Provost Alan Brinkley, who gave an impassioned speech comparing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy to a campus organization that allowed "African-Americans to join . . . only if they pass for white." Oddly, Mr. Brinkley abstained from voting, suggesting he lacked even the courage of these convictions.
The gay issue does seem to offer Columbia a convenient alibi for refusing to participate in ROTC. But however one feels about the policy--and reasonable people can differ--surely it isn't as egregious as the military's pre-1948 policy of segregating black soldiers. Yet by the logic of Friday's vote, perhaps Columbia should now feel ashamed of the prominent role it played, both institutionally and through its alumni, in helping America's war efforts in World War II.
As it is, the military's policy on gays wasn't the reason Columbia originally expelled ROTC in 1969. Rather, it was opposition to the Vietnam War and, once that was over, reflexive hostility to all things military. On other campuses, that hostility has abated in recent years, particularly after 9/11; Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, among Ivy League schools, have ROTC programs, while Harvard University President Larry Summers has been outspoken in his advocacy for ROTC's return to Harvard.
Yet Columbia remains a holdout, not least because of Mr. Bollinger's dismal leadership. It certainly didn't have to be this way. The 1994 Solomon Amendment forbids universities that exclude ROTC from their campuses from receiving Pentagon funding--reason enough, we would think, for a university president to bring his school into compliance with the law. In April 2003, Columbia held a student referendum on ROTC. Two-thirds voted to bring it back. This led the university senate to appoint a 10-member panel to examine the subject; it split down the middle on the question of readmitting ROTC "as soon as is practicable."
But maybe we shouldn't be too bothered by this. Throughout America, schools such as the University of Missouri continue to graduate outstanding young men such as Lieutenant Edens. He may not have earned an Ivy League degree, but he did earn a nation's respect--which is more than most of Columbia's faculty can ever hope to get.
