Storming the Ivory Tower: The Military's Return to American Campuses
Abstract
A recent Supreme Court decision, Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc. (FAIR), has once again opened university campuses to military recruiters. No longer can the nation's most selective schools accept federal Education or Health and Human Services Department dollars while restricting military recruitment on their grounds. As we go forward, it is important to understand the evolution of these universities' antipathies toward the military and to craft a reasoned recruiting response targeting students from schools that have previously shut their doors to the military. After more than 50 years of cooperation between the U.S. military and universities, antiwar protests culminated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps' (ROTC) exile from many campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Two decades later, not content with the mere absence of ROTC, some prominent institutions, such as Harvard and Yale, went so far as to erect barriers to military recruiting on campus, claiming that U.S. Defense Department regulations were incompatible with the schools' own nondiscrimination policies. In the mid-1990s, Congress attempted to bring the military back to these campuses through federal legislation, but several of the schools and their faculties petitioned the courts to overturn these laws. The Rumsfeld v. FAIR decision is a signal victory in the ongoing effort to return the military to the country's most selective universities. Granted, during the past four decades, many schools never severed their ties with the military. Recruiters have continued to play valuable roles in job fairs and career counseling, successfully ushering thousands of students into uniform. For example, today 272 campuses host Army ROTC programs. This article provides a brief exposition of Rumsfeld v. FAIR, then examines the origins of one school's antipathy toward the military, Yale University, as a representative case amongst the country's premier academic institutions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA597080
Entities
People
- Marc Lindemann
Organizations
- United States Army