Will Harvard Bring Back ROTC?

It depends on what "bring back" means.


Following the repeal of DADT yesterday, President Faust issued a statement that included the following sentence: "I look forward to pursuing discussions with military officials and others to achieve Harvard’s full and formal recognition of ROTC."


"Recognition" is exactly what I figure will happen. In 1993, the Harvard Faculty voted to end recognition of ROTC on the basis that it did not comply with University nondiscrimination policy. With that premise gone now, it seems to me a simple matter to restore the status ROTC had before '93 -- an activity in which Harvard students can be involved with the simple courtesies of postering, meeting in Harvard rooms, and so on that are attendant on recognition.


Today's papers, however, are full of stories about Harvard's intentions. See the Globe, the Herald, and the Wall Street Journal. The Globe raises the possibility of an ROTC unit returning to Harvard, which would be a lot more than "recognition": "A Pentagon spokeswoman said it is too early to say whether the decision could result in a ROTC unit being established on campus, but student interest and the military budget are two potential factors."


This makes sense, as far as the Pentagon goes. During the 1990s units were being consolidated, not subdivided. And let's be serious about student interest: At a lot of universities with large ROTC programs, the "interest" students show in ROTC is not greater patriotism than at Harvard, but less institutional financial aid. It is a great way not only to serve your country but to get a free college education. Since Harvard provides financial aid up to need for all students, a huge incentive to sign up for ROTC here is missing, and that will inevitably hold down the numbers. (In fact, that makes ROTC participation here all the more remarkable: the students who do it are doing it without the financial incentive.)


But DADT was not the only thing keeping ROTC at arm's length from Harvard, and the Pentagon's inclinations are not the only relevant factor with DADT repealed. ROTC was booted from Harvard in 1969 by taking credit away from the "Military Science" courses and teaching credentials away from the "Professors of Military Science" whose appointments Harvard did not control. I have no idea if these are things on which the Pentagon would insist today, or if Harvard could or would want to reach some accommodation with military officials about these matters. But before anyone gets too excited about a ROTC unit returning to Harvard because of the repeal of DADT, it is worth remembering that the vote that ended the ROTC unit at Harvard was not the 1993 vote about gays in the military, but the February 4, 1969 vote, which read as below. It is hard to imagine that #1-3 could easily be reversed.

Whereas, the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) program is externally controlled, i.e., taught by professors who do not hold regular appointments.

That the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

1. Withhold academic credit from any courses offered by the three branches of ROTC at Harvard in the future. 

2. Request the Harvard Corporation to terminate the Faculty appointments of the present instructors of these courses as soon as possible after the end of the current academic year and to make not further such appointments.

3. Request the Harvard Corporation to withdraw the description of ROTC courses from the course catalogue and to cease the free allocation of space in University buildings to ROTC. 

4. Provide scholarship funds where need is created by this Faculty decision.

Prayers and exams (for close Harvard watchers only)

Speaking of things that have been done the same way at Harvard for a long time …

Harvard has had morning prayer services six days a week every day since the founding. There can't be many institutions with a record like that.

The service is now held from 8:45-9:00am, and consists of a 5-minute homily by a member of the community, a hymn sung by the congregation, some choral music by a trained student choir, and a prayer or two. I speak there once or twice a year as it's one of the few places where it is easy to speak on moral subjects. The venue has the advantage that homilies are so short you don't need to be fair to the other side of whatever argument you decide to make, and at the same time no one else is given the opportunity to respond. My talks are collected here.

Historically academic activities have been timed to avoid conflicts with the service, even though attendance is now typically no more than a couple dozen people, many of them not students. Classes officially begin at 5 minutes after the hour, morning exams began at 9:15, and so on.

When responsibility for proctoring final exams was shifted from the administration to the faculty last year, the time of morning exams was shifted to 9:00. That would require anyone who wanted to go to Morning Prayers to be a few minutes late to their exam. I doubt this could have happened twenty years ago without some protest; today wonder if anybody even noticed.

I was thinking not only because my own exam is taking place right now, but because the Reverend Professor Peter Gomes, already planning to retire at the end of next year from his post as Minister in the Memorial Church,  has been hospitalized following a stroke. What will be the role of the Minister and the Church in Harvard's future?

Governing Harvard

Two weeks ago, Harvard announced that it was making the first significant change to its governance structure since the 1600s. Several people have asked me what I think.

First a bit of background. After I left the deanship in 2003, I wrote a book called Excellence Without a Soul, in which I gave my views of higher education at places like Harvard, and at Harvard in particular. I was critical of Larry Summers' record as president, but I was more critical of the group that hired him and to which he was answerable, namely the Harvard Corporation--which consists of six "Fellows" in addition to the President. Writing in 2006, I said:

During most of the Summers years, the Corporation was a leadership vacuum. Its members were rarely heard from in public and rarely spoke to those who make the university run, except the president and his staff. If Harvard were a publicly held corporation in today’s climate of intensely scrutinized corporate governance, the shareholders would have been up in arms about the failure of the directors to care responsibly for the institution.

In the great financial meltdown of 2009, Harvard fared worse than many universities. On December 12, 2009, just more than a year ago, together with my colleague Fred Abernathy in Harvard's Engineering School, I published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe that echoed what I had written in my book three years before:

IF AN ORDINARY corporation had the kind of fiscal year Harvard University just had, some of its directors would be gone. Long-term investments down $11 billion; another $1.8 billion lost by top management speculating with cash accounts; another half-billion gone in an untimely exit from a debt rate gambit. The institution left so illiquid that it was forced to sell assets and issue bonds at the worst possible time, just to pay the bills. A publicly held company would have experienced a shareholder rebellion - especially after the Globe reported that the chief investment officer had repeatedly warned the president about the risks he was taking with the institution’s cash.

The blame had to be traced back to the Corporation, and it was time to do something about it. The Harvard Corporation is a dangerous anachronism. It failed its most basic fiduciary and moral responsibilities. Some of its members should resign. But the Corporation’s problems are also structural. It is too small, too closed, and too secretive to be intensely self-critical, as any responsible board must be.

Two days later, on Monday, December 14, senior Fellow James Houghton announced his resignation. This was obviously a coincidence; though we knew nothing about it, the report that Houghton had informed Corporation a week earlier was surely accurate. Ironically, when the Globe accepted our piece on December 9, the editor told us it would run sometime the following week. Things would have looked different had our piece run as originally scheduled, since that would have followed rather than preceded the announcement about Houghton.

A regularly scheduled meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences occurred on Tuesday, December 15. The President, after discussing Houghton's planned retirement and the protocol for replacing him, also mentioned that the Corporation had begun discussing how it could most effectively carry out its roles and responsibilities. In fact, the President continued, Mr. Houghton had been instrumental in kicking off these discussions.

Just a month later, as a favor to a friend who had a book coming out about power elites, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about the Harvard power structure, entitled Harvard's Secret Seven. In it I again called for greater transparency: The modern power elites thrive by forgetting any regrettable past. This amnesia is easy at Harvard, where the legal fiduciaries operate in secret and need not answer for their acts. They are the antipodes of the selfless institutional servants who built Harvard and other great American enterprises, and they bear close watching.


The deliberations mentioned by the President in December had by spring grown into a very public process, reported in detail by the alumni magazine. They resulted in the report of two weeks ago, which makes three dramatic changes. First, it increases the size of the Corporation from seven to thirteen (including the President in both cases). Second, it ends life tenure for Fellows. And third, it creates a functional committee structure, whose members will include individuals who are not Fellows.

All three changes are exactly right. In fact, the third may prove to be the most significant. Opening up critical discussions to a larger group of individuals will require the Fellows to explain and defend themselves. The Corporation will be less likely to function as an echo chamber, accepting the authority of one or two supposedly knowledgeable experts.

What was the effect of the piece Fred and I wrote for the Globe, and my subsequent piece for the Huffington Post? Perhaps nothing; as I said, there is no doubt that Houghton had already decided to step down before our piece appeared. On the other hand, I received enough supportive comments from alumni as well as faculty to know that we were saying things that others thought obvious. So while it is possible that everything might have played out as it did without our criticisms, I suspect that we may have encouraged others to speak along the same lines, more quietly but directly to the decision-makes.

Either way, it doesn't matter. I am much more optimistic about Harvard's future now. I suspect that a good deal of the credit for these changes should go to the President and to the energetic new Fellow, Bill Lee--not a man to leave things alone just because they had always been done that way at Harvard.