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Recruiting the Officer Corps
Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller have a really fantastic op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal that is, alas, password-protected on the Journal's website.* The money quote:
Much ink has been spilled over the fraught relations between the military and the Ivy League. But while the good military vs. the bad Ivies makes for good political theater, it isn't the whole story. While ROTC has been banned from many Ivy League campuses since the Vietnam War, the military has also drawn down its ROTC programs in the Northeast and in urban areas. ROTC has become increasingly Southern and rural.
In Virginia, for example, there are 7.8 million residents and 11 Army ROTC programs. New York City, home to over eight million people and America's largest university student population, has two Army ROTC programs. The entire Chicago metro area, with its 10 million residents, is covered by a single Army ROTC program, as is Detroit. Alabama, population 4.7 million, has 10.
After my first year at the University of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Army decided our ROTC program should merge with and move down the street to Drexel University, which admittedly made some sense because Drexel had a National Guard Armory on their campus. It is thus one of the quirks of my biography that I was Drexel University's ROTC commander as a college senior despite having never attended Drexel.** But the U.S. Army has made a lot of decisions based solely on monetary cost-benefit calculations that have resulted in ROTC withering on the vine in the urban areas of the Northeast and, as Schmitt and Miller point out, a disproportionately small number of military officers hailing from the large middle-class suburbs of our nation's urban centers in the North.
Schmitt and Miller end their column sharing President Obama's lament that "every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan ... That's not always the case in other parts of the country ... [It's] important for the president to say ... that if we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some."
The U.S. Army, then, needs to be more intentional about recruiting officers outside the American South. It is no coincidence that the only combat arms officer commissioned into the U.S. Army from my class of 2,000+ at Penn was a white southern male. (The other officer commissioned graduated from Penn's top-ranked nursing school.) There is nothing wrong with white southern males, of course (we Scots-Irish are, after all, America's warrior class), but we can hardly claim to accurately represent our nation's awesome cultural, racial, social and ethnic diversity, and there is an argument to be made that a nation's officer corps should do that to some degree. The burden for making that happen falls more heavily on the U.S. Army than it does our nation's university presidents.
*I know it makes a lot of sense for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to charge their customers for the news services they provide. But the op-ed and editorial pages are ostensibly meant to spark public debate, and I fail to see how keeping opinion pieces behind a paywall does that.
**Many thanks, though, to all the cadets of the "Dragon Battalion" for their service. I am a proud alumnus and made a lot of good friends through the program -- who I would not have met had I remained south of Chestnut Street!
UPDATE: @dianawueger pointed me toward this earlier op-ed in the Washington Post that made some of the same points. Depressing fun fact: "the Army's self-imposed target for officer-training programs in the New York City region is roughly 30 new officers per year."
Don't forget we had almost
Don't forget we had almost all the Philadelphia area schools... La Salle, St. Joes, Rutgers, etc. Not just the Army either, NROTC was over on Penn's campus.
It sounds like you are saying that there are fewer number of officers being commissioned in Northeast Schools because the Army consolidated the programs. I seem to remember it being the reverse: the programs were consolidated because there were fewer students enrolling in the programs, so it made budgetary sense to consolidate them.
I wonder how much the Army can really do to attract more officers from the Northeast. There is a cultural mindset that needs to be overcome here, and that's not going to be easy.
Maybe you got the same
Maybe you got the same sense, but most of the officers who were stationed at Fort Drum seemed to be from the North. Fort Drum (and Sackets Harbor in particular) was like UC-Berkeley compared to areas like Daleville, Alabama or Fayetteville, NC.
Abu Muqawama content
Abu Muqawama content breakdown:
Overselling Exum's limited biography 37 %
Telling us that he has a girlfriend 12 %
Shout-outs to "friends" and aquaintances 21 %
Kissing up to the Obama administration 26 %
Useful analysis 4 % (...and half of that is Londonistani's)
This reminds me of 2003 On
This reminds me of 2003
On the eve of a threatened U.S. invasion of Iraq, concerns about the military's racial and class makeup have raised questions about the fairness of America's all-volunteer force. Pointing to a military that is disproportionately black, and often from lower income and less educated families, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has proposed resurrecting a draft.
"Go and see how many Ph.D.s there are in the military and how many people from the top 10% of income levels," says Emile Milne, Rangel's spokesman.
If the economy keeps tanking, PhD's might find a military salary preferable to a barrista's salary, tho...
Soon after you had journalists referring to the "army of the slums" in Iraq, particularly during the Rumsfeld era as torture and assassination, unpleasantly enough, became official policy in Iraq. However, the most disastrous decisions didn't come from "the slums" but from whitebread Ivy League wankers with an inflated notion of their own wisdom and intelligence. That's what happens when incompetence meets wide-eyed greed, as was the case in Operation Iraqi Liberation. Also known as "Gifting Afghanistan Back to the Taliban."
Even if we bend over backwards and agree that Saddam was a bad guy, who had to be removed- dubious at best - then why not do this: Follow Shinseki's suggestion and go in with "on the order of several" hundred thousand troops, meaning 300,000, instead of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz approach.
Of course, the actual justifications for the war were faked - from the mobile bioweapons labs to the nuclear yellowcake from Africa to the VX and smallpox stockpiles - it was all nonsense, as the CIA's Iraqi Families program revealed prior to the invasion. That information was deleted in favor of the fraudulent Curveball report - and the whole thing was sold by think tanks, retired generals, and compliant media sources. Yes, Saddam was a bad guy - but a bad guy with no links to Al Qaeda, and no access to WMDs, despite media hype like this:
www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2002/09/10/2002-09-10_saddam_defender_stuns_collea.html
"We can be reasonably confident they had VX [nerve gas] and additional biological agents, but we never verified they were gone," said Tim McCarthy, a former deputy chief inspector and nonproliferation analyst at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. . . "It's very safe to assume that Iraq is coming along with its nuclear weapons program," since inspectors were barred in 1998, he told the Daily News.
Former inspector Raymond Zilinskas, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the Monterey Institute, said Iraq might also have stores of smallpox from a 1960s outbreak. "If his regime is going down the tubes, then the question is, in this extreme moment would they then release the smallpox," Zilinskas said.
Do you smell that? Do you smell that? Bullshit, son, nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of bullshit in the morning. You know, one time we sold this war with a bioweapons fairy tale, and when it was all over I walked up - we didn't find one of them, not one stinking anthrax spore - but the smell of shit, you know that rich redolent stench - covering the whole country - it smelled like victory.
Some day this war's gonna end... :(
The South will Rise,
The South will Rise, again!!!
Our constitution will be the Bible and we will bring slavery back, but compensate them fairly--kinda like Wal-Mart and Target.
* whistling Dixie...
Two-Star Voodoo, why on
Two-Star Voodoo, why on Earth do you read and comment on this blog if you don't like it? The internet is a large place! Are you that bored? Based on your preferences, I think you will like this blog a lot more than mine: http://tiny.cc/6b5ajScotch-Irish is what we
Scotch-Irish is what we called ourselves when we came to this country and what those who stayed behind choose for their name now I care not.
Never forget that before Ireland was not just Scotland but the Border, and that we, Borderers, the people most responsible for conquering this country, were the only inhabitants of the Isles prepared to fight the natives on their own terms and in their own style and win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Reivers
There was a wave of interest in the Scotch-Irish around the beginning of the last century and many books now freely downloadable can be found at google books, such as The Scotch-Irish In America:
http://books.google.com/books?id=5iJCAAAAIAAJ&dq=the+scotch-irish+in+ame...
1) I haven't read Webb's
1) I haven't read Webb's book, but is it based on compelling social science? Calling oneself part of a warrior class seems a bit presumptuous.
2) "[It's] important for the president to say ... that if we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some." This would seem an argument for universal conscription than broadening the ROTC base.
3) What about the enlisted ranks?
4) What about studies using zip codes that show service is evenly distributed?
ADTS
Matt Gallagher said it best.
Matt Gallagher said it best. There's a reason why rednecks fight our wars rather than kids out of Los Angeles. America wants to win its wars.
I need to go back and read
I need to go back and read it, but I'd highly recommend reading "Our Army" by LTC Jason Dempsey:
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Army-Soldiers-Civil-Military-Relations/dp/0691...
More Whites from the Bible
More Whites from the Bible belt in the Marines=Winning the War
More Blacks and coloreds in the Army=Not wanting to go over the wire to walk through the new units coming in the AO=Losing the War
This discourse reminds me of
This discourse reminds me of the hand-wringing post Bush reelection, as liberals tried to understand why he won again. For such enlightened folks, they were awfully reductionist, conjuring up images of border cattle lords and uncivilized Celtic tribesmen wanting to fight everyone: Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Shawnees, Abbie Hoffman, and Muslims. Nobody managed to explain if environmental determinism played a role in Southern culture, the difference between structure and culture, the rise of Evangelical Christianity in the South, the influence of Calvinism, the M.I.C., and the post WW2 fierce identification of these Southerners with corporate interests, or why other "Celtic" peoples don't act like Southerners. No, it's just Vercingetorix in a Nascar hat.
But on ADTS question, Webb's book is bunkum.
Amongst a whole mess of Freudian fluff about Webb's upbringing, you'll find that Rosa Parks had the courage to stand up to racism because she was Scotch-Irish. Daniel Boone, whose Quaker forbears were from Wales and Devonshire (not the Borders, laddie) was also Scotch-Irish. Everyone becomes Scotch-Irish; the closest thing I can think of this tendency is what you see in historical discourse in Turkey or Eastern Europe where they try to claim everybody and ancient cultures for their nationalities (Turks as Sumerians; were Cyril and Methodious Macedonian or Bulgarian? you decide). Webb isn't even down home. He's an army brat, he didn't grow up down home. That's an important fact to remember; Webb is only getting part of the picture. He doesn't realize that the majority of males are not alpha. Rather, most are beta, and far from being don't tread on me individualists; they are communal and hierarchical to a fault. That's why po white fools rode the backroads at night keeping an eye out for some rich man's slaves.
Webb taps into the Celtic, white male victimization that became popular after Mel Gibson's Hollywood, largely mythical, account of Scottish history amongst Southerners and Protestants. Prior to that Celt as victim of the Saxons was limited to embittered Irish Catholics, who introduced the poisonous notion of victimization politics to this country long before everyone caught onto its uses as a source of patronization and scoring rhetorical points. It's the kind of woe is me, my grandpa saw a "no Irish need apply" sign in the window and therefore I am justified in hating Hispanic immigrants. Ted Kennedy saw one of those signs, you know, strangely enough in a 1950s Boston where you couldn't even get a job in the post-office unless your name started with an O' and you gave love to the Roman church.
We weren't always Celts, though. Prior to the Civil War, Southerners liked to brag of being related to the Normans, the great winners of British history. But nowadays everyone is a victim, even people who volunteer for military service. In the late 19th century/early 20th century, Southerners were described as pure Anglo-Saxons. The reason being the Protestants of the North quivered in fear before an onslaught of Southern and Eastern Europeans. They needed allies against the newcomers, so around this time the old hostilities of the Civil War died down, and everyone became friends again (provided your surname didn't end with a vowel other than y). But not all Southerners are so gentil, so the po' whites were explained as the scum of London, mixed in with some Celtic stock. This old theory was revived in time, as things Celtic became more and more trendy, to give us the current concept.
ADTS, Webb's "scholarship" is a dumbed-down version of McDonald and McWhiney's "Cracker Culture", a book beloved of neo-Confederates who derive some degree of satisfaction over the fact that our ancestors were barefoot savages when the Romans showed up. According to the meme, these Celtic warriors have been the ongoing slaves/dupes of perfidious Anglo-Saxons who think up the wars and make all the cash. They can take wounded pride, then, if they wish in being descended from idiots, but not me.
My question, if what Webb says is remotely true, and Southerners are the Gurkhas of the US, at what point did the soft-handed Yankees force Southerners or their Midwestern cousins to go fight for them? Also, Webb overlooks the fact that many Southerners, like their Highland Scots cousins, benefited from the empire in terms of military careers . Do you think the Highlanders would have made it to India on their own, much less serve as colonial administrators? No way, they'd be back home chomping on boiled fish.
Let's face it, the M.I.C. has been good for the South. And I think on one level Southerners understand that. They are willing to sacrifice a small number of their own to the god of bellicosity in order to keep the benefits going, keep the army as social safety valve available, and for some communities keep the bases. It's either that or we continue taking in garbage, which Southern municipalities are happy to do as well.
For a good take on this Celtic stuff see R. Berthoff's "Celtic Mist over the South" in the Journal of Southern History, for a slightly more gentil version of Webb, see Kevin Phillips "The Cousin's Wars" or D. Fischer Albion's Seed.
Agree with you that the Army
Agree with you that the Army (and other services) should widen the net on this so to speak.
However I was thinking that the College/University presidents would be well served in opening their doors to ROTC in that it would provide some additional diversity of thought and additional career paths for graduates.
Just Sayin
>we can hardly claim to
>we can hardly claim to accurately represent our nation's awesome cultural, racial, social and ethnic diversity, and there is an argument to be made that a nation's officer corps should do that to some degree.
Andrew, you DO realize that saying "there is an argument to be made for X" is not the same thing as actually making that argument?
I always thought that the function of the officer corps should be to provide competent leadership, but that was just my stupid enlisted wishful thinking, I guess.
There's a nice way of
There's a nice way of getting around the paywall - copy the title of the WSJ article and paste it into a Google search. The first or second result will undoubtedly be the article - click on it, and it will be the whole thing.
LHS, Thanks. ADTS
LHS,
Thanks.
ADTS
M. Lind wrote oabout the
M. Lind wrote oabout the South being full of folks who signed up for every war in American history. See here (back in 1999): http://newamerica.net/node/5710
"Cousin Kenny, who has been
"Cousin Kenny, who has been on the old family farm all his life, lives on a hilltop. A forty-foot flagpole in his from yard flies Old Glory and the eagle, globe, and anchor of the Marine Corps. He has one son in Iraq. He hunts alongside his other son and grandson in the ridgefield above Shanghai Road. And like the ghosts of those men watching them as they hunt on what to us is hallowed ground, Ken and his boys are meat hunters. For them and tens of millions like them, guns will always be tools as ordinary and commonplace as a hammer or a cigarette lighter, yet endowed with the power of memory and the Devil's own fire. For fifty years Kenny has oiled his guns and walked this ground, haunted by Pap, Daddy, Uncle Nelson, haunted by the Scots-Irish and Huguenot forefathers who likewise trod here, who planted it in buckwheat and hunted its frozen stubble. And when we hear that distant rifle crack, followed by the endlessly repeating echoes across the leafless ridges, we know the echoes are the sound of their guns bringing down a buck somewhere in heaven."
Here is some background
Here is some background information from the Cadet Command historian provided at a symposium at Fort Leavenworth in 2005:
"The disruption stemmed from the last minute scuttling of the “Elite Brigade,” dubbed the “snooty” brigade by some of its critics. This Elite Brigade was the creation of Major General John T.D. “Rusty” Casey, the Cadet Command Commander from the summer of 2000 through the summer of 2003. The brigade included prestigious schools such as Princeton, MIT, Cornell, Duke and Johns Hopkins.
Casey initially wanted to organize the ROTC along functional rather than geographic lines. He assumed that the units in this proposed brigade would have essentially the same demographics, confront many of the same problems, share a common culture, operate on similar assumptions, and respond to incentives and other policies essentially in the same way. A brigade commander and staff could manage more efficiently a brigade with such a homogeneous institutional base. As it was, a brigade commander had a great range of schools within his area of responsibility, schools with disparate needs and characteristics that differed greatly in terms of cost, competitiveness, and societal standing. Casey wanted to extend his functional organization scheme beyond the so-called elite brigade. He also considered organizing a brigade for senior military colleges (i.e., VMI, the Citadel, Texas A&M, North Georgia College, Norwich University) and for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).
Just as the Elite Brigade was about to be implemented, however, a retired general officer who was a member of the ROCKS, an organization devoted to the mentoring of African American junior officers, learned of Casey’s plans and reportedly intervened with the TRADOC commander to block its formation. The general feared that the creation of this unit would greatly weaken the position of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) within the ROTC structure by siphoning off scholarship dollars to high cost, prestigious schools. His fears may have been justified because Casey was widely regarded as a great proponent of bolstering ROTC’s presence in the nation’s elite universities and of lowering the program’s presence in less competitive schools."
From "“The Organizational Evolution of Cadet Command, 1990-2003” presented by Cadet Command historian Dr. Arthur T. Coumbe in "Army at War: Change in the Midst of Conflict", John McGrath, Editor
(http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/resources/csi/content.asp#army) Pages 515-551, CSI Symposium proceedings, Day Two.
The Army does not seem
The Army does not seem hungary for over-educated elites. Example: I am from a well off family, worked for Human Terrain Systems, have a masters in IR, spent along time in the middle east, does the Army care? No. Thats fine, because I want nothing more than to be an Army officer. (and what an honor to be accepted)
I just finished my OCS boards. Wow, this whole process is slow. I walked into the recruiters office in May. I doubt I will be in Basic until february.
Highly educated people (and probably everyone) struggle with such a slow, unenthusiastic process.
The Army does little to reach out to big fish. The Army seems happy with knowing that it will get boys from the south.
The Army does not seem
The Army does not seem hungary for over-educated elites. Example: I am from a well off family, worked for Human Terrain Systems, have a masters in IR, spent along time in the middle east, does the Army care? No. Thats fine, because I want nothing more than to be an Army officer. (and what an honor to be accepted)
I just finished my OCS boards. Wow, this whole process is slow. I walked into the recruiters office in May. I doubt I will be in Basic until february.
Highly educated people (and probably everyone) struggle with such a slow, unenthusiastic process.
The Army does little to reach out to big fish. The Army seems happy with knowing that it will get boys from the south.
If you run into a
If you run into a password-protected WSJ article, just Google the headline and click on the link. You can see all the text that way. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with Google News.
tsk, tsk, little Exum, how
tsk, tsk, little Exum, how touchy can one get? The 'don't read this blog if you don't worship me' defense? Weak. Weak. Weak.
Toughen up, kid. It's gonna get a whole lot worse. The artificial glitter of your stardom is fading fast, and pretty soon, you'll have to answer for all the things you got wrong.
Sucks to peak early.
@ LHS, "Vercingetorix in a
@ LHS,
"Vercingetorix in a Nascar hat."
Priceless.
@ Elites - BTW what's with the NASCAR hate? Other than so much of flyover America likes it....
1. The Ivies and other
1. The Ivies and other Eastern schools banned ROTC or made recruiting difficult.
2. The military sought elsewhere.
3. The military has always been disproportionately southern.
4. The razor sharp intellects typical of Ivy League alums are not the most important attribute of outstanding junior officers.
5. Gen DePuy extolled the high intellect of the German general staff and made the case that smart soldiers fight better than ones of average intellect. True. Matter of degree.
6. Am amazed by the quality of all our troops -officers and enlisted.
7. Don't think think the military has any obligation to recruit in every geographic area -or for its recruiters to come crawling back after having been chased out. Think the diversity mavens would fight you on this one, anyway.
8. To the extent off the chart intellects are needed, they can probably be provided by the academies. Their product has to be equal to or close to that of the Ivies. Annapolis' class of 2014 had 17,000 applicants for slightly over 1000 seats. Very few of that lot are losers.
9. Lastly, if a student is jazzed enough by the prospect of military service, there are plenty of routes to commissioning for an officer candidate -including attending a school that does offer ROTC.
10. Last of all: Mr. Exum please don't lower yourself by answering personal attacks. Yours is the finest open forum of its type. And it is yours. The commenters worth reading might include a brief personal salutation -but go on to deal with the topic at hand. Am seldom disappointed by the commentary in my areas of interest. Thank you.
V/R JWest
My argument for Columbia
My argument for Columbia ROTC, which can be applied to other Ivies: http://www.securenation.org/rotc-at-columbia-university/
Columbia University, with its gifted students and rich combination of first-tier university and New York City resources, offers an ideal partner for ROTC to “recruit personnel with specialized skills” (p 51) and “ensure . . . officers are prepared for the full range of complex missions” by “enhancing these skills . . . during pre-accession training.” (p 54) Recognizing officers need greater academic breadth and depth to be “better prepared to assume the responsibilities of waging war, peacekeeping, stabilization, and other critical missions carried out by our military” (H.R. 5136 p 5), the Department of Defense has already responded with the Alternative Commissioned Officer Career Track Pilot Program to facilitate their advanced education. In the same vein, cultivating an officer corps with the capabilities identified by the QDR necessitates the best possible intellectual foundation for military leaders. The Department of Defense, therefore, has a compelling interest to produce officers with greater capacity and a strong academic grounding in the formative pre-accession (cadet) stage of their development. ROTC at Columbia meets that need.
My argument for Columbia
My argument for Columbia ROTC, which can be applied to other Ivies: http://www.securenation.org/rotc-at-columbia-university/
Columbia University, with its gifted students and rich combination of first-tier university and New York City resources, offers an ideal partner for ROTC to “recruit personnel with specialized skills” (p 51) and “ensure . . . officers are prepared for the full range of complex missions” by “enhancing these skills . . . during pre-accession training.” (p 54) Recognizing officers need greater academic breadth and depth to be “better prepared to assume the responsibilities of waging war, peacekeeping, stabilization, and other critical missions carried out by our military” (H.R. 5136 p 5), the Department of Defense has already responded with the Alternative Commissioned Officer Career Track Pilot Program to facilitate their advanced education. In the same vein, cultivating an officer corps with the capabilities identified by the QDR necessitates the best possible intellectual foundation for military leaders. The Department of Defense, therefore, has a compelling interest to produce officers with greater capacity and a strong academic grounding in the formative pre-accession (cadet) stage of their development. ROTC at Columbia meets that need.
JWest @ 9:30, You are
JWest @ 9:30,
You are building a strawman. This is not a narrow issue (thankfully) about Ivy League schools. It is an issue of the Military systematically withdrawing from large swaths of the nation it serves. If the services ignored the Ivy's and were aggressively courting officer candidates at places like CUNY/SUNY and New Jersey City University (places they were never "chased from"), your argument would be more potent. In this case, kids from middling public institutions and top-tier universities are being withheld ROTC opportunities alike.
No one "kicked" Army ROTC out of Brooklyn in 1991 or Manhattan in 1989 - it withdrew voluntarily. Ditto for the paring of Army ROTC assets in NJ from 4 to 3; in Chicago from 3 to 1; in Pittsburgh from 3 to 1; and in Philadelphia from 4 to 2.
Most students in these states attend public colleges and universities (e.g. SUNY and CUNY). Please tell me how their attributes are inferior to their peers in southern state schools. Personally, I'll put the academic quality of the SUNY system, my alma mater, against any other state's system.
Actually, OCS/OTS opportunities in the USAF and USN for civilians are a long shot these days - single digit acceptance rates. The issue is most acute with the Navy because it has no NROTC opportunities - anywhere - in NJ, CT, RI or NH. Its NROTC program in NYC is open to only 26,000 of the 600,000 colleges students in NYC - CUNY, NYU and Columbia students (among others) are not allowed to participate.
No, no one is saying the military "has" to do anything. We are pointing out that the current course is deeply flawed and bypasses legions of talent that are needed in our military - both in the enlisted ranks and officer corps.
For a "proof of concept", look at the USMC. They aggressively market on every campus and seem to have a great yield for those efforts. Their officer cohort, at least geographically, is the most representative of the services. Proof positive that smart and effective outreach works and brings in people with needed skills and talents.
Isn't it strange that even
Isn't it strange that even though the officer corps has been overwhelmingly from the South for some time, the leaders who have distinguished themselves lately are almost all from other parts of the country? For example:
Patraeus - New York
Keane - New York
Odierno - New Jersey
Mattis - Washington
Chiarelli - Washington
Mullen - Los Angeles
Cartwright - Illinois
McMaster - Philly
On the other hand, both Franks and Sanchez are Texans...
Hi ST, As you know, the
Hi ST,
As you know, the issue for me centers on ROTC in the Ivies, specifically Columbia. Of course, Columbia happens to be in NYC, attached to Barnard, next door to (CUNY) CCNY, and among thousands of NYC college students marginalized by ROTC.
FYI, for our blog host and his readers, there will be a civil-military conference at Columbia University on Oct 2 hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society (campus cadets and officer candidates group) and MilVets (campus student-veterans group). For more info and register, go to http://www.serviceandsociety.org/.
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Columbia Service and Society Conference Invitation
From: "Hamilton Society"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Hamilton Society of Columbia University
Service and Society:
Engaging the Military and the University
Alfred Lerner Hall, 2920 Broadway New York, New York
October 2nd, 2010
. . .
1. During and post Vietnam,
1. During and post Vietnam, the military was treated like crap at most of those campuses -state, Ivy, liberal arts playgrounds -whatever.
2. Was easier to bag it and go elsewhere.
3. As recipient of a considerable amount of that "goodwill" myself, understood completely.
4. Thirty years plus later, the wheel has turned, but institutions adapt to change slowly.
5. The Marine Corps has always had a sophisticated and aggressive recruiting apparatus. Members of my cohort that excelled in that venue were rewarded with FMF assignments and service school placements normally reserved for stars in fleet service. Also, had to put up with several overpromoted E-7's and 8's; they received promotions based recruiting proficiency and had trouble wearing their stripes back in the fleet.
6. The USMC Officers at campus job fairs did their work extolling PLCs or whatever and were gone on to the next site. Anyway, they were too handsome, in their dress blues, to abuse seriously.
7. USMC recruiting is a wondrous thing. And I'm sure my DI's, Tac Officers at OCS and TBS, various CO's and subordinates all praised the peculiar genius of my recruiter.
8. The only two on your list that I'm sold on are Mattis and McMasters. None are going to be remembered twenty years from now -except by military professionals. (Unless Gen. P. does something 'presidential')
9. Can't think of anyone with Southern antecedents that belongs on it, either. Pity, that.
V/R JWest
My daughter 16 years old
My daughter 16 years old decided that she would like to investigate the possibility of ROTC. We live in Philly and went on the campus tour of Drexel. The staff at the admissions office siad go drop by the ROTC building and see them- it was closed and the email was non-functioning when my daughter called they told her thanks for being interested and went over the physical requirements - and to go look at the website. Given that the average 16 often has the attention span of a gnat and that we don't live in a community where info re ROTC is readily available they might go out to local schools and inform people about their programs...
What grants are being
What grants are being offered to those that are interested?
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Single motherhood is on a rise across the globe. In the past 20 years the figures have almost doubled. Though the trend started with celebrities and successful career women, nowadays career oriented women in their 40s, prefer to live alone and decide to be the single mom while pursuing their careers. For single mothers, like women who have never been married, divorced, or widowed has one characteristic in common and that is the desire to be a mother, and a belief that they can alone do a good job of raising a child. A good support structure and financial aid for single mothers is crucial to the success of single parenting. More information here http://www.financialhelpsinglemother.com
Single motherhood is on a
Single motherhood is on a rise across the globe. In the past 20 years the figures have almost doubled. Though the trend started with celebrities and successful career women, nowadays career oriented women in their 40s, prefer to live alone and decide to be the single mom while pursuing their careers. For single mothers, like women who have never been married, divorced, or widowed has one characteristic in common and that is the desire to be a mother, and a belief that they can alone do a good job of raising a child. A good support structure and financial aid for single mothers is crucial to the success of single parenting. More information here http://www.financialhelpsinglemother.com
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