Uniforms, like patriotism, make a comeback on campuses
In 1969, antiwar protesters sprayed chicken blood over ROTC classrooms at the City College of New York. A year later, vandals trashed the Navy ROTC building at Northwestern in Evanston, Ill., forcing the program to move under Dyche Stadium. Throughout the U.S., armed forces instructors took to wearing civilian clothes when they walked on campus. Recalls one: "There was no sense in being harassed."
But today, instructors are visible again, and the Reserve Officers Training Corps programs of the Army, Navy and Air Force are making a comeback. Enrollment is up, and so is the prestige of ROTC. "They're not knocking our doors down," says a Washington-based ROTC official, "but it is better." As Barbara Patton, 24, a cadet at Pennsylvania's Drexel University, puts it, "The war is over."
In 1973, the year the draft was abolished, Army ROTC enrollment fell to 33,000, or about one-sixth of its 1967 peak of 177,000. Today the number is 65,000. Air Force ROTC has climbed to 22,500, only 10% below its Viet Nam peak. The military is still absent from some private colleges, including Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown and Colgate, all of which ejected ROTC in the Viet Nam era. But Navy ROTC now has a waiting list of 30 schools that want to join the 55 other campuses that train midshipmen. Army ROTC has grown from a low of 250 schools to 279, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown and most major state universities.
One campus where the ROTC's fortunes have improved is Princeton. There, a third of the 3,000 undergraduates were enrolled in ROTC during the early 1950s, but the number began to dwindle after the Korean War. The faculty voted to strip academic credit from military courses in 1970, causing the Navy and Air Force to withdraw. The Army, which held the ivied fort alone, has seen its enrollment grow by 10% annually. Now the roster numbers 96, including ten women.
Some rules have been relaxed to make ROTC students feel more at ease. Male cadets need not cut their hair short, and uniforms are required only during field exercises. But the telling development is that the students no longer feel they have to camouflage their armed forces connections. Says Senior Kim Thompson, 22, Princeton's first female cadet commander: "As a freshman, I would never dine in my eating club if I didn't have time to change out of my fatigues. Now I'll go in uniform." Thompson noted a sharp drop in the razzing she got after the U.S. hostages were taken in Tehran. ROTC, she feels, has also benefited from student enthusiasm for fitness and outdoor life. Says she: "We've had more civilian participation in ROTC activities like rafting, rappelling and the marathon."