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A Word About Last Night's State of the Union Address UPDATED
Last night, President Obama said the following:
Our troops come from every corner of this country -– they’re black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American. They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay. Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love. (Applause.) And with that change, I call on all our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation. (Applause.)
Okay, there is one huge problem with this. It's easy to demonize the "elite" universities for not having more ROTC programs, but the reality is that the U.S. military has been the one most responsible for divesting from ROTC programs in the northeastern United States. It's hardly the fault of Columbia University that the U.S. Army has only two ROTC programs to serve the eight million residents and 605,000 university students of New York City. And it's not the University of Chicago's fault that the entire city of Chicago has one ROTC program while the state of Alabama has ten. The U.S. military made a conscious decision to cut costs by recruiting and training officers where people were more likely to volunteer. That makes sense given an ROTC budget that has been slashed since the end of the Cold War. But it also means that the U.S. Army and its sister services are just as responsible for this divide between the so-called "elite" living within the Acela Corridor and the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I was one of two Army ROTC graduates in my class at the University of Pennsylvania, but it was not the fault of Penn or the ban on gays in the military that the U.S. Army decided to shutter the ROTC program at Penn after my freshman year and move us all over to Drexel's program. (Go Dragon Battalion, by the way!) The U.S. Army made a decision based on a logical (if short-sighted) cost-benefit analysis, and if there were only two people in my class of 2000+ at Penn (with one of them being from East Tennessee, which is far from Philadelphia's Main Line) who wanted to do ROTC, why did it make sense to fund a separate battalion?
The bottom line here, expressed far better than me by John Renehan in the Washington Post, is that we need to stop scape-goating the elite universities for the lack of ROTC on campus. Instead, we need to ask harder questions about what kind of efforts we need to make to build an officer corps that best represents the American people.
Update: Cheryl Miller of AEI has a response to my post up on the Weekly Standard's website, largely agreeing with what I wrote but adding more. Cheryl is the real subject matter expert on ROTC, so be sure to read what she has to say.
I'm an MIT alum from the late
I'm an MIT alum from the late 1980s. There was a ton of ROTC on campus when I was there, mostly AF and Navy. So it's not strictly a geographic issue.
Erik, That may have changed.
Erik,
That may have changed. I'm a current grad student at MIT and when I see the Army cadets doing PT in the morning, I'm 100% certain that their numbers are not much greater than at Drexel (I was a cadet there 97-02). MIT hosts 9 schools from the area, Drexel hosted a similar number. BU also has their own battalion, but again, it is comprised of students from several schools. I see maybe 3-4 cadets total (all branches) on campus during the week. MIT has about 4K undergraduates. If you compared this with schools in the south, I'm fairly certain the ROTC programs would be larger without drawing on as many schools. The point is that Andrew is correct, in the Northeast, ROTC simply doesn't draw many cadets as it does in the south and midwest.
Is it strictly a geographic factor at work here? Probably not, but it's definitely correlated.
There are other factors that I think are at work, but I don't want to open that can right now.
MIT is mostly all engineers.
MIT is mostly all engineers. These are probably the best canidates for our Officer Corps. Logical, grounded people, with "sometimes" strained social skills. (Hey, AM aren't you an Engineer?) No pun indended, engineers can be awkward people in social settings :-). ROTC helps round these guys and girls out into hard working / well spoken leaders, that have the brains to keep all those are they responsible for, safe in combat.
Would I want a Berkley & Harvard mathmatician like Robert Strange-brew McNamara as my platoon, company or batallion commander? F- No! If the U.S. Army was smart, they would stay away from Ivey League Schools and focus on engineering programs at schools like MIT, Clarkson and RPI.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Albany, NY has Navy/Marine Corps midshipman and Airforce programs for ROTC. Not sure if they have a Army program. Sounds like the Army needs to reogranize their Officer Corps.
Here's a good article on Penns decision to immediately start recruiting LGBT students for their ROTC program.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/penn-to-recruit-gay-students-will-it-help
(Gulliver, you are so
(Gulliver, you are so busted.)
FYI- UVM's ROTC Program has
FYI- UVM's ROTC Program has more numbers than MIT's....that's kinda shocking.
"Currently, the Green
"Currently, the Green Mountain Battalion includes Cadets from State University of New York Plattsburgh, Saint Michael's College, Champlain College, Castleton State College, Johnson State College, Middlebury College, and Norwich University." (http://www.uvm.edu/~goldbar/?Page=gmbhistory.html)
Maybe not so shocking...
From a NCO perspective.
From a NCO perspective. Education data reflects America is now 25 in the universe in college completion, where in the late 80's we were number one. 65 % of HS students go to college, 10 percent chose trade school avenues,10% hangout 9% at risk youth and only 1% volunteer for service. If college completion is a factor...simply stop rotc all together...There is OCS. And most infantry NCO's do not "trust" ringknockers", or rotc-iees, from the on-set but for some reason OCS still works and savvy NCO's know a OCS officer is a roll ones sleeve up kinda leader. I also think its time to have a serious debate ,to wit: if college completion ratios remain the same, in a decay..then student loan programs need to be shut down at the federal level and allow for regional banks to "approve" the motives of students who say one thing and do another? vr
I'm happy to support anyone
I'm happy to support anyone who wants to serve. But let's be honest about another thing - there isn't exactly a burgeoning mass of college students who are being stopped from entering the military due to the lack of a ROTC presence immediately on campus.
Received my commission in 2004 with a total of one other NROTC grad from Stanford (our unit was based at UC-Berkeley). 2 out of approximately 1,600 total BA/BS graduates.That number has been pretty consistent (IE less than a handful) for as long as I can remember. Berkeley, which has significantly more undergrads and hosts the Navy ROTC program for the Bay Area, commissioned about a dozen officers in 2004.
I question the cost-effectiveness of installing significantly more ROTC detachments nationwide. Certainly there are some places that would benefit from additional units (or even the presence of just one), but that has to be tempered against the cost of setting up a CO, XO, junior officer instructors (we had 2 O3's), drill instructor (we had a Gunnery Sergent), and admin (we had a Chief Yeoman) - plus civilian support staff.
This goes back to M4's Op-Ed you linked earlier - we have to build a culture of service first. Expanding the infrastructure for a non-existent need just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm happy to support anyone
I'm happy to support anyone who wants to serve. But let's be honest about another thing - there isn't exactly a burgeoning mass of college students who are being stopped from entering the military due to the lack of a ROTC presence immediately on campus.
Received my commission in 2004 with a total of one other NROTC grad from Stanford (our unit was based at UC-Berkeley). 2 out of approximately 1,600 total BA/BS graduates.That number has been pretty consistent (IE less than a handful) for as long as I can remember. Berkeley, which has significantly more undergrads and hosts the Navy ROTC program for the Bay Area, commissioned about a dozen officers in 2004.
I question the cost-effectiveness of installing significantly more ROTC detachments nationwide. Certainly there are some places that would benefit from additional units (or even the presence of just one), but that has to be tempered against the cost of setting up a CO, XO, junior officer instructors (we had 2 O3's), drill instructor (we had a Gunnery Sergent), and admin (we had a Chief Yeoman) - plus civilian support staff.
This goes back to M4's Op-Ed you linked earlier - we have to build a culture of service first. Expanding the infrastructure for a non-existent need just doesn't make sense to me.
I turned off the
I turned off the TV...............
The SOTU got more clear and it made more sense.
I will talk to my Republican Congressman instead.
Part of the decline in
Part of the decline in numbers for AFROTC is the funding changes. In the mid 80s when I graduated from Penn and did my AFROTC at St Joseph's Univ (where all AFROTC for Philadelphia was conducted) over half the cadets were Penn or Drexel students. Hardly any from St Joe's itself. Back then, a full scholarship paid all your tuition, no matter what school you went to. This was a great deal if you went to Penn. By the 90s, the Air Force limited the number of full tuition scholarships in favor of scholarships that were capped at the level of state school tuition or less. The demographics shifted accordingly. Not sure about Navy or Army. Penn still hosts a Navy Det. But Andrew is correct, much of the blame gets thrown at protests of the Vietnam War, but the services have not kept up with costs at many schools in the Northeast. Also, the services often do not send officers to the schools that are remotely acceptable to the host schools in their credentials also. Often, the reason a school dropped ROTC was becasue the cadre are considered faculty and they were really not up to the standards of the rest of the faculty in credentials or in content of the classes.
I'm a Georgetown grad because
I'm a Georgetown grad because Columbia and Yale didn't have Navy ROTC programs I could attend. Expansion and choice is a good thing, I think. That said, Go Hoyas!
"I'm a Georgetown grad
"I'm a Georgetown grad because Columbia and Yale didn't have Navy ROTC programs I could attend."
Don't lie buddy, you went to G-town because Columbia and Yale admissions office wouldn't accept a bribe from your Daddy. So, you couldn't get into Annapolis? :-( ....the plot thickens.
If it helps, I think you should have attended Kings Point. :-)
AM, You can thank the
AM,
You can thank the Democrats for the lack of ROTC interest (at least at the school level). Lot of the school administrators are from that mentioned party. It is not so much that they are Democrats(there are Republicans too), it is because State Schools are usually money sinks not profit centers. When Federal and State money was pulled out of the schools in the 80's (that is really not true, the money shifted from the school's pocket to the student's pocket via grants. In return, schools raised their tuition to get it back!) Universities went looking for a new sugar daddy. Today the top Universities are funded by research dollars, donations, and more by student tuition that ever before. Federal and State monies are still present. For our little school the budget is $4 Billion. $1B is from State revenue, $1B from tuition, the remaining $2B yearly cost comes from Federal grants, donations, and royalities on intellectual property.
Since Democrats think that everyone should have a job for life with benefits out the kazoo to death do us part, the spending at Universities is vast and wide. It is something that you do not see in corporate America anymore. Use to be that the pay at Univerisities was lower, but to get "good" people schools are justifying higher and higher salaries, but do not cut the benefits. When I walked into industry, the first thing I signed off was rights to royalities. Guys doing research at Universities are getting a cut of the research pie (about 40-60%). Plus a $110,000 salary (tenured). Plus 90% pay at retirement with health care. The University cries for more money all the time. There were 50 odd major construction projects on campus this summer. New Engineering building was funded through the State's capital expense budget at $450M and the college is doing a fund raiser with the Alumni to double that. It just goes on and on. The State is right up there with California going broke ! Top ranked deficit.
Long story shorter...(?)
Active part of this discussion is were Universities get money. Research, Donations, Research. (did I mention research?). It is why the schools are pushing the "best and brightest" slogans. The more they push for the top status the more they can get the top rated people in for research work. The top rated students have a higher chance of doing well outside of Universities which means a good chance of donations. I have seen some alumni drop some really heavy change lately and the administrators line up with woodies to get the money. We are talking millions at a time in lump sums.
Hate to say it ROTC, military, and Alumni really do not make a splash on campus unless you are carrying your check book with you.
I have been to the job fairs on campus. Industry pays top dollar to the University to get a table and participate. Companies give research money to profs in return for getting the inside scoop on a student's performance, they will rate the students for the recruiters. It is about as busy as a whore house on Saturday night. It is all about the product. I stood and watched the behavior of the students while I was talking to a Marine recruiter. The Marine had his dress uniform on looking sharp. Kids just walked by, they are looking for the hot paycheck and the stardust of INTEL, BOEING, Catapiller, and MicroSoft. At the top ranked schools, industry will pay good money to the Engineering students. It is one of the reasons that some companies will recruit the Southern schools like Geogia Tech, students are just as bright and they are not looking for heavy cash (they still get paid well). Not saying that GA Tech is low ranked(just an example), there are other smaller schools in the south.
Personally, I would rather recruit the southern schools. You bring in a person that is just as bright. They just did not go to the school with the branding/marketing. You get down to it, Engineers all study the same material. In the end, they will appreciate that you helped them out and brought them along.
Universities are about fund raising anymore, it is a money game. If the schools trimmed their budgets and got the fat out of the system, they would not be begging so much for cash. The need for cash gets in the way of their charter to educate children. Our State Unversity goes after international students cause they pay top tuitition. The international student also represents a person that has been vetted by competition in their own countries so that maps into a person that can turn research dollars for the school. For every international student that is in a State University, the son/daughter of a US father that built that school misses an opprotunity.
Our Education system is screwed up not because of lack of funding, it is because we have our priorities all bitched up.
Just a different point of view, I have seen the process start, middle, and end. I did college recruiting and plant interviews for a Fortune Five-hundred company as an Electrical Engineer. The bitch is when you start interviewing the people you worked with for 25 years cause of off-shoring, that is competition defined. You know the people you are talking to are not going to get the job cause someone else has a different agenda.
Obama has no clue.
""Currently, the Green
""Currently, the Green Mountain Battalion includes Cadets from State University of New York Plattsburgh, Saint Michael's College, Champlain College, Castleton State College, Johnson State College, Middlebury College, and Norwich University." (http://www.uvm.edu/~goldbar/?Page=gmbhistory.html)""
Norwich University has always had a good percentage of LGBT students on campus and they also have a large population of over-educated / elitist "wanna-be military" spook students- in Norwich's extended learning graduate programs. Happy to hear Norwich is mixing it up with the rest of the red-neck's in the North East, it should balance all of them out.
BTW..... 11:54PM
BTW.....
11:54PM (updated)
This might help to put the $4B /yr University budget in perspective (and the fat).
Add up the remote campuses and the extension offices the University has about 30,000 employees.
Add-up the Undergrad and Grad students...........There are about 50,000 students in the school.
That is a ratio of 2 students to each University employee !
The local politicians will not go up against the spending cause there are too many votes and mouths fed. The school can do anything it wants!
ROTC just does not pay the bills for a large University. Just about any department that does not produce money has been targeted. Studio Art program use to be one of the better in the country and now it hardy has a heart beat. As the art teachers retire, programs are shut down. Police Institute is part of the University which is being shut down cause it does not produce money for the school. Per the school, "the Police Institute does not match the charter of the school". When is teaching police officers not part of a school's charter? Go figure.
While we're talking AROTC, I
While we're talking AROTC, I just want to point out that the Hoya BN over at Georgetown is full of some 150 great Americans from GU, American, George Washington & Catholic. At GU, at least, many of the kids (35+) turned down whatever choch Ivy/military school you want to name and came here instead. I almost went to Swarthmore... was planning to take the train in to Philly for everything. God, that would have sucked.
Also, much respect to Mike @ 7:00 for repping Gtown as well... Navy ROTC meets over at GWU but there are definitely a bunch of their guys who lurk around campus.
The services don't make ROTC
The services don't make ROTC easy in the north, but the "elite colleges" can be asses about it too.
That MIT battalion, for instance? It also houses the cadets from Harvard Yard, who only get to do things on campus because of a few rich alumni who rent it for them and provide the school with a layer of deniability. Elsewhere, cadets aren't that lucky.
Take the Hoya Battalion, which I know best. Students from AU, Catholic, Howard, GW, and Georgetown are all part of the same battalion, but every school gives and takes different privileges to the students - it's only this winter that we got AU to let cadets work out on campus. For years they've been travelling (in their own cars) down to Georgetown at the crack of dawn to do their PT, not to mention dealing with constantly shifting standards and routes for getting to their military science classes.
Hell, even if AU and all the other schools in the Hoya Battalion give the cadets all the access to campus space they need, there's still going to be problems. They get credit for their classes via the consortium of DC schools that administratively links the area universities, which means that they only get as much credit as the academic policies of Georgetown (the host school) allow them. Which is currently half a credit a semester for the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes, with a jump to normal credit for the senior semesters. Presents a rough dilemma - do you give the cadets more work than they're going to get credit for and hope they come out the other side intact, or do you dumb down the education of future officers just so they can stay sane and balance their schedule?
And that doesn't even have anything to do with DADT. The credit's that low because Georgetown was a hotbed of anti-ROTC activism during the Vietnam War, when a jesuit or two went on hunger strikes to get them kicked off campus and the old military science building was burned down. Georgetown didn't kick them all the way off campus, but the ROTC offices have always been kept far from main campus and the credit got dialed way down. And, shockingly, enrollment in the battalion plummeted.
Don't get me wrong - there's plenty of hard questions for the military side of this equation to answer, and you're right to raise them. But don't absolve the universities of guilt. The problems I've just outlined with the Hoya Battalion are hardly outliers, and it's going to take more than wishful thinking to bridge the gap that's spread between our top schools and our training corps.
Now we can talk about
Now we can talk about Yemen......
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_YEMEN_PROTEST?SITE=AP&SECTION=...
Just took a while for the crowd to get going.....
Clinton said the U.S. supports efforts to address the underlying causes of extremism: poverty, corruption, social inequality and political divisions that have boiled into an insurgency. She said Yemen must stop the practice of child marriage and enact reforms.
You tell them Hillary.....lol. She always gets me.
PS.....For you Twitter heads out there....
What you gonna do when Ma Bell cuts off your service when you are revolting?
CLICK..............silence
The power of electricity. Take it for granted don't you.
I think the Marines fill the
I think the Marines fill the gap left by limited ROTC programs in the Northeast...lots of Northeasterners seem to find their way into the marine Corps.
As a US taxpayer, I really do
As a US taxpayer, I really do not want my taxes stabilizing a country so American Corporations can off-shore into them. America really has a high tab for DOD spending.
GE, Motorola and the rest of the CEO crew can follow in the wake of Obama. Jeffery Immelt can hire his own security staff ( I would like to suggest Xe, they are good hired guns. Might have to get some more liability lawyers on the staff...huh) on the GE spread sheet not the US taxpayer's. Jeffy, are you paying US taxes on the money you got stuffed off-shore? Expecting a big profit from jet engines and avionics in India and China? Broker a deal on you own with the local governments, they are getting the tax revenue from the off-shore JOBS not AMERICA! That are free-markets in action!
The more globalization is pushed, the more commodities will soar.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870329320457610605097954945...
In India, the chief executives of some of the country's largest companies cited rising food prices as a problem because they hurt the poorer sections of India's population and could translate into political uncertainty.
Motorola spun off its semiconductor operations in to "ON" and "FREESCALE". It was one of those Earned Value Model (EVM) things that MOTO takes it serious (bean counter magic). If you are not NUMBER ONE, you are chicken shit. It has to do with market share, making markets ("Intel Inside" 286, 286, Pentium...you get the idea), the price curve of new products (marketers love it when you can not live with out it), and the expection that CEO's have for their bonus. When MOTO sold the business it gave the Semiconductor employees a chance to stay with the mother company. Being good semiconductor people, they stayed in the diode mine. After the date passed where the ex-MOTO employees could not go back in to Corportate Motorola, MOTO annouced.........Oh, and by the way...."Your lost your pensions, if you didn't stay with Corporate MOTO". That detail was not released until it was too late.
That story came from a Top Ranked Engineering school graduate that was sold off by MOTO as a semiconductor employee. He went back to school and received his Master's in Computer Engineering in his late 40's and hired back into MOTO to do imbedded software for cell phones. MOTO sold him off again when Qualcom and Yahoo purchased MOTO's cell business employees. When I was talking to him, he check back with his offfice a couple of times to see if he still had a job. That is EVM at Motorola. That is the American job market. Obama says that we need to be competitive. He has no clue, he has not had a job in the private sector.
Motorola's CEO is one of the people that is tagging along with Obama to India. MOTO was also part of the meeting of CEO's in Washington DC.
Obama is getting a lesson in EVM and creating markets for his buddies. He was in Wisconsin....
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/soturesponse_01-26.html#
The Obama qoute is, " there is no room for second place".......or you are chicken shit. EVM.
America needs to be a leader, but their is room for 2nd place in America we don't have to push it off-shore. It is about reseting profit expectations and overhead of operations. You really do not need a high speed rail, you need Amtrak to turn a profit. You do not need the fastest supercomputer, you need to do get the most out of the super computers you got.
Our Unversity just completed the largest Scale Computer operation it has ever had. The NEW building covers a city block. The OLD super computing operation, which is also a NEW building, covers another city block. Maybe it is time we think about getting the most out of what we have, we have a lot.
"The credit's that low
"The credit's that low because Georgetown was a hotbed of anti-ROTC activism during the Vietnam War..." Sounds like they still are...
G-Town has always been the primary FSO mafia location, along with Harvard for those who become or are legacy U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officers. Now think about the mindset and politics of those who attend G-town as students and their professors. Doesn't take much time to figure out these people look at ROTC / the U.S. Military as a necessary evil and not a valuable resource.
Why doesn't G-town offer special parking for its ROTC commuting students on campus? These guys and gals (most likely come from low to middle class America) are spending their hard earned money on fuel and maintenance for their POV to get to PT and their military classes and on top of all this - they are only getting a 1/2 credit? That is very sad to hear. The ROTC students from American, George Washington & Catholic must feel like second class citizens riding on the back of the bus.
I bet many host Universities treat their subordinate school's the same as G-Town treats American, George Washington & Catholic. Someone should do a study on these discrepancies and give the results to SOD Gates and the Pentagon. Only problem is Gates, received his doctorate from Georgetown University. Does it make you feel all warm and fuzzy to know the boss is in bed with University Administration / Staff?
American, George Washington & Catholic ROTC students should get together and write SOD Gates a letter, to tell them about their plight. He might actually respond to it and help them out.
Here is another piece of
Here is another piece of information about that $4 Billion/yr Major State University.........
It does have a ROTC program.
It also had an unground marksmenship range. The range is in the same building that ROTC pratices drill and has offices/class rooms.
The State is so anti-gun (like California) it used EPA law to shut down the indoor practice range. It is a shame, that range served many students during the Vietnam war. Use to be they allowed the public to use the range for a fee. Due to the EPA regs....the State has shut down just about every indoor range for miles around.
Looking at the old year books from the University, the Cadets use to drill on the main student center, it is a several acre grass field flanked by all the main University buildings (english, chemistry, history, administration). Guess that is why the College is kicking the Police Institute off campus, their gun range is out door on campus property. They have M4's (real ones) that they let students actually touch (think of that a police trainee touching a M4 on campus) in the center of campus.
Gives the liberal profs fits.
You want to know the sad
You want to know the sad part.......
If the ROTC guys drilled on the campus commons, the international student organiztions would have a melt down.
Just think of a parade of jack-boots marching behind an American Flag on campus!
You laugh. The University administration got rid of the school mascot. The mascot that represented the school for over 80 years. The administration in its big international push took the State name off the school logo. Now it is just a nameless symbol. The big push is to get Chinese students in the school.
It is a State University funded in a major way with State and Federal Money.
I just shake my head at what we are doing to our selves as Americans.
In Florida......communities have deed restrictions on flying the American flag....it affends the neighbors. Really! lol and crying out loud.
The administration does not want ROTC....it is not part of their charter.....think about it. It gets in the way of business.
Mr. Exum. Regarding ROTC
Mr. Exum.
Regarding ROTC in Chicago: Illinois Institute of Technology has ROTC units in the Army, Air Force, & Navy. Northwestern University (3 miles north of the Chicago line) has a Naval ROTC (whose students I regularly teach) which also includes students from Loyola University in Chicago. That University of Chicago does not have a ROTC unit at all may well be lamentable but it does not preclude students in the Chicago area from being a Cadet.
"we need to ask harder
"we need to ask harder questions about what kind of efforts we need to make to build an officer corps that best represents the American people."
But hopefully is not representative of the American people. Any country that has Fox News as it's major source of information, has millions of people who think Sarah Palin is qualified to be POTUS and millions more who voted for "the One we were waiting for" deserves what it gets.
"we need to ask harder
"we need to ask harder questions about what kind of efforts we need to make to build an officer corps that best represents the American people."
Does it really have to represent the American people or just be effective? Why is representing the American people important? Is being effective important? What is the priority?
........................
Who think Sarah Palin is qualified to be POTUS ???? ....she is a natural citizen. Shouldn't anyone have the opprotunity to run that meets the constitutional requirements? To someone, having a military that represents the American people is important. Palin is in the population of natural citizens, it would be only fair for her to have her chance. America gave DADT a try, get over it.
Yes and my mechanic is
Yes and my mechanic is qualified to be CEO of Ford.
BTW 75% of US high school kids are not "qualified" to attempt to be privates in a bulk fuel platoon.
The only way to get a military that represents the US population is through a draft without deferments that has nasty options for those unable or unwilling to complete military service.
Really your mechanic would
Really your mechanic would most likely be the most qualified to be CEO of Ford.
The ding bat that is running GM pointed to a pop can and said,"my product is just like this can, but it costs $30,000". He is not an auto person, just a bean counter and not a very good marketing person. My mechanic knows that if he calls the car I just paid $30,000 for a pop can, he is out of a job !
Got a point about the high school kids, not all place in the ASVAB.
Really, I think this is just a liberal wet dream to have the military look like the rest of the government....broken.
Here is a concept.......All those who volunteer represent the total population of willing Americans.
Use that as your model of what you will get to put in your military.
Meanwhile, Egypt is rising.
Meanwhile, Egypt is rising. Ho hum.
Black Block Cairo viva!
Oh, and joy of joys, here is
Oh, and joy of joys, here is black block Kairos manual... Just like in Europe, but points for innovative use of spray cans. Finally some muslims who know how to throw rocks at proper range! Egypt- Iran 1-0.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activi...
"but the reality is that the
"but the reality is that the U.S. military has been the one most responsible for divesting from ROTC programs in the northeastern United States. "
Really?
By the way, why is Cheryl a SME on ROTC?
I was always taught that an argument is an opinion backed by facts. This is just your opinion. No facts at all here.
For example: It is a fact that the number four college in terms of Medal of Honor Winners, is in fact, Harvard University. A school that divested ROTC in the Vietnam War. One can tie an awful lot of the movements of ROTC to the politcial impacts in and around Vietnam.
Much of the colleges you refer to in the Northeast and in Chicago divested ROTC in the Vietnam War era. It was a function of student protests, which, as a point of fact, were widespread in the Ivies and sure was in Chicago.
To blame the Army for just randomly pulling the plug on ROTC makes no sense. Not the truth. The Army pulled the plug on programs that were in hotbeds of protest, and it was the protest on the part of the students at those schools that caused ROTC to move south and to rural areas.
Columbia: In spite of
Columbia: In spite of Columbia's military tradition, the administration effectively barred ROTC programs from campus in 1969 to appease student protesters and disgruntled faculty.
Harvard: In 1969, the arts and sciences faculty voted to force ROTC units off campus to register "disapproval of the military" in response to the strong pacifist sentiment of antiwar activists.
Yale expelled ROTC in 1969. Brown in the early 1970's, Stanford in 1969.
Your article is factually incorrect.
http://www.theatlantic.com/in
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activi...
The Egyptian protester's should say "Nee!" until the government appeases them with what they want.
Page 4 needs some innovative ideas, like fake mustaches and KY Jelly, rather than liquid soap.
Almost no marketing is
Almost no marketing is tailored for most students attending the caliber of institutions debated in this thread. As the only AROTC graduate from the University of California at San Diego in 2009 (out of a total undergrad/grad population of over 32,000), I can recall going through Orientation Presentations by LGBT student groups, social activist clubs, and ethnicity-based orgs, but never did I see a uniform. Now for a school founded in the wake of Sputnik as a technical grad school, and located in a city built and maintained economicallt by the DoD, this now strikes me as absurd. Since the Iron Triangle of the Civil-Military-Industrial complex does not seem to be disappearing any time soon, is not this so-called "Sputnik moment" of our current generation the opportunity for the military to capitalize upon the reestablished respect for the Officer Corps, current lack of a booming job market for graduates, and continued financial support for ROTC students in the face of steeply rising University tuition and fees?
Yet there is no campaign to enlighten the masses of bright patriotic students who simply have never considered a military career, because they have never been targeted with a reasoned marketing approach. The Army has adopted Information Operations and PYSOP as its en vogue solution to issues abroad and yet its attempts to "Persuade, Change, and Influence" the next generation of military leaders in notably absent.
There will always be brilliant Type A hard-charging crew-cut types to fill the long gray line of USMC cadet corps, and make ring-tapping General Officers one day. Likewise, there will always be those to fill the ranks of the Combat Service Support branches paying off state college loans and avoiding the competitive private sector job market. (And yes I understand these are gross over-generalizations, and yet I could point to dozens of examples to support my stereotyping). But where is the in-between ground of middle class kids that once saw a military term of service as both an obligation and opportunity of citizenship?
"...Norwich University has
"...Norwich University has always had a good percentage of LGBT students..."'
Speaking of marksmanship way to shoot yourselves in the foot with the first salvo. You just can't help but cut right to the freak fucking show, can you? Narcissistic and neurotic and self absorbed. And frankly self defeating.
And while I don't want people harassed or persecuted, NO on handing the "T" part a machine gun.
The Campus is it's own little world. Personally I think most of our "elite" universities should be razed anyway - it's the corruption and the flat out treason, and cost (and nothing to do with LGBT).
Me I skipped the SOTU - don't feel bad I ignored Bush the last few years as well.
Does anyone know WTF these
Does anyone know WTF these protesters want other than an end to kleptocrats?
And Biden also gets his BOLO badge for foot shooting
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2011/0127/Joe-Biden-says-Egy...
Send in the clowns.
Anyone want to make a bet on
Anyone want to make a bet on who's next across the Maghreb:
Will it be Morocco, Algeria or Libya?
Any takers?
Uh... reality check? The
Uh... reality check? The subprime loan scandal has a nice corollary in the college loanshark scandal - only here, foreclosure is not an option.
What's the average student loan burden of a new 'elite college graduate' who didn't come from a highly privileged background (i.e. with parents who had a spare $30-$50,000 per year in cash to drop on their heads for 4-5 years?). $100,000 at least, right?
You're not going to make much headway paying that back on a entry level officer salary, are you? On the other hand, if you did want to recruit such people, a loan forgiveness program WOULD be a good incentive - more useful than a bogus missile defense agency, anyway.
Keep in mind, the volunteer army exists because of the realities of urban and rural poverty - which, incidentally, is the same reason Egyptian kids sign up for the police and military. It's not a bad deal, usually. . . before the neocons came along, at least.
Speaking of which, I'm very curious as to what those Egyptian kids in the police and military forces are going to do next. . . and I do recall when the Soviet army turned its tank turrets on the Kremlin after the putsch. Who doesn't?
Touchy topic for the U.S. State Department, isn't it? What will our good ally in Egypt do? Fold or go on a bloody rampage? Those are the two options, correct?
In completely anecdotal and
In completely anecdotal and irrelevant news:
I'm an undergrad at the University of Chicago and I actually know a couple guys who do ROTC somewhere outside of the university. Good guys. But the reason that there's no ROTC here has little to do with politics and everything to do with, well, the makeup of the student body. This is a surprisingly non-political campus - heavily pro-Obama, but for reasons of affiliation as much as politics. There's not frequent or large protests, and the administration is not avowedly political - this is after all the home of free market economics. I suspect that the lack of ROTC has more to do with low numbers of recruits - we're a bunch of nerds. I cannot see there being large numbers of people signing up for ROTC if it came here, frankly.
Visitor 11:53 IIRC, when I
Visitor 11:53
IIRC, when I went there (a while ago but not *that* long ago), the U of C had both the highest per capita Marine Corps OCS (or PLC) candidates *and* Peace Corps volunteers. When I was a prospie, my guide was an AF ROTC cadet at IIT; I also knew someone who did PLC and was offered (but declined) a commission; and I knew others who were militarily inclined and pursued it during and/or after graduation.
I don't think that the makeup of the student body has much to do with the lack of ROTC on campus. We may (have) scoff(ed) at other schools as *not* being the place where fun comes to die, or where hell froze over, but I'm just guessing that there are, nevertheless, nerds at other schools, including, say, Yale, where (IIRC once more) there is the Semper Fit club.
There are enough competitive people on campus that, I think, ROTC would appeal (what's the name of the new gym - Rattner?). And I think, with PISP (and to a lesser degree, PIPES) and people like J Mearsheimer and R Pape on campus, there is a fair deal of curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts of security/strategic studies.
As for free market economics, that is *one* "Chicago School;" I remember being in the home of the Chicago School of Sociology when, to the offense of some, the professor brought in a union labor organizer to speak *and* solicit donations. Look at who's been protesting HTS - Marshall Sahlins, among others. I highly suspect that the Anthropology Department's faculty would not be a fan of ROTC on campus - which is their right, of course.
But to claim that faculty preferences and clout hardly make an impact on the presence of absence of ROTC, because of the U of C's relationship with free market economics, does not strike me as a compelling argument - one which, to throw around my insider knowledge of the institution in a hopefully humorous light, would not pass muster in a Hum or Soc class.
Not to get worked over it, or be angry at you or your post, more just to engage in dialogue *about* my alma mater with someone *at* my alma mater. (I continue to have some very *semi*-formal connections with it via my local alumni club and participating in the admissions process). (And given the decrease in admissions rates, you're probably someone smarter than me - although I have my own quarrels over whether the decline in admissions rates reflects increased selectivity. But I'll save that debate for another day.)
Crescat scientia, vita excolatur.
ADTS
(Apologies to all other readers for the U of C lovefest)
I was just told by one of
I was just told by one of your slavish followers that you think you could teach most strategic courses at Johns Hopkins SAIS. My god, the arrogance in you. I seriously think you should change your name to Courtney Massengale.
I was just told by someone
I was just told by someone that you think you could teach most strategic courses at Johns Hopkins SAIS. My god, the arrogance in you. I seriously think you should change your name to Courtney Massengale.
After Giffords was shot, all
After Giffords was shot, all of Congress was buzzing about checking the mental health status of American citizens.
Who is check on the mental health of the people who let this happen?
Seems to me a lot more damage was done.
http://blogs.reuters.com/prism-money/2011/01/27/5-essential-truths-missi...
As the consensus conclusions of yesterday’s Financial Crisis Commission (FCIC) report showed, “the captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to understand and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public.” Human folly, greed and hubris caused this $11 trillion debacle.
There is a Einstein quote that says, "to do the same thing over and over is insane".
Yet Fannie and Freddie are still soaking up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars. Foreign Aid keep pouring into the Middle East. The war in Afghanistan has been going on for ten years. Surges keep on surging. The US taxpayer just propped up the American economy and put the same players back in the driver's seat, AIG is still in business.
There is a picture of all this in the dictionary right next to "mentally retarded".
If Congress and the regulators were a gun dealers, the government would take away your profession.
Maybe that is what the mid-terms were about, the American citizen becomes Dr. Citizen.
Now this is something I can
Now this is something I can believe in......first thing that I have heard out of Dear Leader that makes sense.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/29/us-egypt-usa-idUSTRE70R6A92011...
"I just spoke to him after his speech and I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise," Obama told reporters following a 30-minute telephone conversation with the Egyptian leader.
Just hope jerking the aid is not just more hot air.
Really when you get down to it. The whole thing is distasteful. If money was given to a US politician for direct action the American public would have a fit. Pay-for-play is the Chicago way. Why does the US government do pay-for-play in its foreign relations?
The US President "telling" a leader of a foreign country to do something. No wonder these people do not trust the US.
Do that State side and you will get a hardy FU......WTF.
@ ADTS I think you bring up a
@ ADTS
I think you bring up a lot of good points and I'm not sure if I made myself as well understood as I perhaps could have.
WRT the political aspect of campus - certainly there is a large liberal presence on campus, even a large contingent of academic leftists, and there's a ton of people who care a lot about politics. What I mean to say, I guess, is that the student body isn't militant in the same way that some others are, is not committed to radical action or protests - it simply seems not to happen here. And the point I was trying to make with regards to the Chicago School of Economics is that this is a school which is at least fairly open to conservative viewpoints, particularly with regards to economics - although it's certainly not a conservative school, it's also not a school which is institutionally liberal.
I guess my argument is this: I suppose I'm agreeing with AM in saying that I don't think that it makes sense to attribute the lack of ROTC at the U of C to political motives or institutional opposition. I don't think that the school is institutionally liberal to a very great extent; it certainly has a strong connection to free-market economics and to foreign affairs and international relations. And I don't think it comes from the student body - which is certainly liberal, but which is not particularly radical (I honestly only know one serious communist, it's kind of shocking) and is not given to protests and things like that. So if we're looking at why there's no ROTC at U of C - given the way the school operates now, I don't think it can be attributed to politics or the fact that it's an 'elite' institution. My first instinct in finding another explanation was falling back on the 'fun comes to die' stereotypes. That was probably wrong - as you pointed out, and I've seen the same thing, there are a decent number of people who are competitive, who are interested in military-type careers, etc. I'm not sure what a better explanation is - maybe the way the school runs has changed and it used to be more political and elitist, maybe I'm just plum wrong, who knows.
The admissions rate thing... it's a surprisingly controversial thing, there's a lot of people who really think that the university, by getting a larger pool of applicants, is abandoning traditional U of C culture (of being weird nerds, I guess). Not sure how I feel about it myself, honestly. It is enjoyable talking about these kinds of things with someone who knows about this.
And I definitely join you in apologizing for the mountain of words about the U of C.
Visitor 11:53/5:43 Points not
Visitor 11:53/5:43
Points not well understood or interpreted were due to *my* reading errors, not your exposition. And in the below, I'm using some of your points not necessarily as you meant them to be read or debated, I think, but simply as a backdrop for my own points.
Back to substance. I don't know if I'd label the school "not conservative." I think there's a difference between using the term conservatism as in change versus stasis, instead of as an antonym for liberalism.
Look what happened when Sonnenschein tried to reform (reduce) the Core. He lost his job. I'd add that most if not all schools are conservative institutions, at least to some degree (Van Evera, "Why States Believe Foolish Ideas"). Most institutions have means by which they perpetuate their own ideas and practices that are hard to change, e.g., ROTC. The U of C is a prime example of this, creating a "fun comes to die" ethos, or practice of considering itself the only place that fun came to die.
I imagine the problem is in part one of collective action. There may be enough students and others (e.g., faculty) who want ROTC on campus, but assembling them into a cohesive group and working together, without too much free riding, would be hard in many if not most situations. (Read Olson, "Logic of Collective Action" if you haven't already.*)
I also think that historical institutionalism (read Thelen in the Annual Review of Political Science or Shepsle in "Preferences and Situations" - or both!) and path dependence (Pierson, "Politics in Time") are the reasons the U of C does not have a ROTC program. I don't know if the U of C ever had a ROTC program, at least along the lines of today's ROTC. Let's assume it did have one right up to and partially through the Vietnam War, then decided to exclude the program from campus. That's 65 years of not having ROTC.
And bureaucratic inertia sets in and solidifies. Once the U of C took the step (which I'm never really sure it did) of ending ROTC as we know it (i.e., not as a university that helped train soldiers during WW II, say), it hit a "critical juncture" (I think a discussion of it is in "Preferences and Situations," and probably in Thelen and Pierson, too) which made it harder to go back. Reinforcement of tradition and reticence to change the absence of ROTC may have, in large part, just continually withered over time.
So I think the issue isn't so much set in the present - e.g.., whether enough students want ROTC - but rather set in the past - *at some point the U of C and ROTC either split ways or never joined together in the first place, and as a result the U of C moved to the equilibrium it's currently at. Granted, the last sentence has a lot of falsehood in it - sometimes a little change can cause big changes (again, see Pierson, "Politics"), and this may be a critical juncture, especially with the end of DADT.
But once more, my bias is that "history matters," and trying to explain the absence of a U of C ROTC program is perhaps best told by taking "the long view" rather than, say, present conditions. Again, that may be bunk - maybe the existence of free market principles and social conservatism, which itself may be an example of historical institutionalism, suggests a campus in which conservatism is tolerated and encouraged (do they still public the Criterion?).
Yet to me the issue of whether a school has a ROTC program is far more expansive than simply whether Chicago perpetuates a free market economics department. Again, universities are conservative institutions in which, due to the sinecure of tenure and the decentralized organizational structure, presidents and deans largely lack hiring and firing power and thus must attend to non-academic functions such as fund raising and admissions. That conservatism, whether ideological or material (presumably, the former but perhaps the latter), serves to make difficult the establishment of ROTC on campus - and would probably to a degree at nearly all universities.
ADTS
* I'm not trying to show off by citing - at least not too much - but just wanted to say, here is some reading you might want to look at,, if you haven't already and you're inclined to do so (because I'm sure you have plenty of time in your hands at the Reg or Harper or Crerar).
ADTS..... WRT the political
ADTS.....
WRT the political aspect of campus - certainly there is a large liberal presence on campus, even a large contingent of academic leftists, and there's a ton of people who care a lot about politics. What I mean to say, I guess, is that the student body isn't militant in the same way that some others are, is not committed to radical action or protests - it simply seems not to happen here.
Think you are splitting hairs. Trying to seperate your little berg from the rest of the population. Divide and purify to make holy. Have you heard of Twitter, Facebook, Internet, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen? Word seems to spread anymore.
Recently the student body of our $4B budget state school boycotted the US Army Corp of Engineers. The students would not talk to the campus recruiters. Kiddies had a "stop traffic day" and laid out in the streets to protest the war. Those were Iraq and Afghan war protests. Also recently, the student body had a cow over a young Republican group having a student organization on campus they thought they were going to be over run! When the kids unroll the rainbow colors, it is about diversity on campus. Local Greek house had a party with a Mexican theme. Problem was the greek house was next to the "Spanish House". Guess the Spanish house did not understand the Frito Bandito costumes. That caused the Univeristy to come to a stand still. Funny, telling the young republicans to go to hell did end in a learning moment to accept foreign cultures on campus. That was about the time the 80 year old mascott that took center field during football games got fired. During Vietnam, there were riots on campus complete with National Guard. Think the chant was,"if you were ROTC you're a NAZI". Little local humor come out of the mess. The cousin of a local wanabe pizza merchant fire-bombed a camera shop on campus during a Vietnam riot. The building was right accross the road from the student union building (center of campus). Needless to say the camera shop owner gave up and moved leaving the building vacant for the pizza merchant to start his first pizza shop in town. Leave it to liberials to find a place for capitalism. Che Guevara was a proud papa that day. It was hard to find a campus in the 60's that there was not some form of protest. We did not have the problems that Kent state had, guess that was cause of all the flowers the protesters stuck down the barrels of the National Guard troops. I would not call our campus a liberal campus, but like most liberals if they are in the neighborhood they are rather vocal.
The ROTC guys keep to themselves on campus anymore. It took America about 15-20 years to shake off the nutty Vietnam Vet thing.
Per the Voice of America, our State University (about $2.5 billion in state and federal revenue funds the place, mostly more if you include all the DARPA money) hosts over 7,000 international students each year (15% of the student body). Another way of looking at it is over 7,000 American fathers who built the First Class University will have to send their children elsewhere. We have local parents in town that have to send their children over 100 miles aways to a different University....go figure. Some how the Profs kids aways get in the school.
Does the 14% foreign children in the state school's sudent body represent the total population of American citizens?
I know for a fact that the 7,000 foreign student population is way more than ROTC....and it is important that ROTC population represents the American population?
Jeepers, my head is hurting.
BTW....Not against foreign strudents. May sound like it. When Dear Leader says become more competitive......why are we turning American children away from our own schools?
Different subject, but along the same lines.......I am going to sit back and have a real gut buster laugh watching the far left figure out the privacy laws around the firearm back ground issue. The ACLU is going to go into overdrive. You guys are going to take turns running over your own feet.
Blueprint for Harvard
Blueprint for Harvard ROTC:
http://www.securenation.org/blueprint-for-harvard-rotc/
Senator Robert F. Kennedy ’48 often cited a George Bernard Shaw quote “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” We need a similar attitude in preparing a blueprint for Harvard ROTC. We need to move past the bitterness of 1969 and look past the DADT issue of today. We should dream of having a “Steven Ballmer professor of Game Theory” who teaches a course that gets ROTC credit. We should dream of what such new faculty can do for Harvard, and how such an ROTC+ approach can benefit the military and the country.
Blueprint for Columbia ROTC:
http://www.securenation.org/blueprint-for-columbia-rotc/
If the evaluation of Columbia as an ROTC host school is limited to the military’s current accounting standard, then Columbia will continue to be doubted as a candidate to host ROTC. Realizing ROTC at Columbia depends on university, government, and military leaders who can see beyond current ROTC metrics and envision the benefits of an institutional partnership that invests Columbia’s strengths in the military and vice-versa.
Columbia - A University that
Columbia - A University that allowed Oleg Kalugin to teach there? ha!
You can't teach a old dog new tricks.
CU is far to liberal of an institution & far to old / set in its ways to host ROTC. Simple as that.
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