Word: rotc
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This week brought an end to Harvard's five-year ROTC debate, at least officially. Meeting yesterday, the Harvard Corporation approved a new relationship between the University and the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), that will effectively end Harvard's financial ties to the program. While it may not satisfy partisans on either side, the new policy is a sensible, if somewhat belated, compromise...
...decision brings an end to a protracted and sometimes acrimonious debate that began in 1990 when the Faculty of Arts and Sciences called on the administration to sever ties with the ROTC program because it discriminated against homosexuals...
Five years later, after a committee report, administrative delays and several more Faculty resolutions calling for an end to financial ties, Rudenstine proposed the creation of a separate fund to allow Harvard students to participate in ROTC, while ending the University's direct financial support of the program. At the time, we endorsed Rudenstine's plan as a sensible balance between conflicting interests...
...same time in the pursuit of fairness, the administration must consider the benefits that the ROTC program provides to students. ROTC provides scholarships above and beyond Harvard's financial aid office, and for many participants, it is a prerequisite for a future military career. If Harvard were to prevent students from participating in the program, it would lose many of the two dozen ROTC students who enroll each year...
Therefore, it would seem sensible to permit ROTC as a valuable program but to forswear funding it as part of a discriminatory institution...