The actual relationship between Harvard and each ROTC unit is governed by a contract signed by the University and the service concerned. The Navy and Air Force contracts (signed in 1926 and 1952 respectively) have been largely superceded by subsequent informal agreements. But the Army contract was signed only in 1966, and with slight variations, it can be regarded as the prototype for all three of Harvard's units.
Under the 1966 contract, the Army agreed to staff and equip a Department of Military Science at Harvard, which would provide the required Army ROTC courses at no direct expense to the University or its students. It further agreed to offer commissions to successful ROTC graduates, and to pay ROTC cadets a $50 monthly allowance as provided by the ROTC Vitalization Act.
In return, the University agreed to maintain the Department of Military Science "as an integral academic and administrative department of the institution," and to provide to this Department, free of cost, whatever classrooms, office equipment and storage space it might need. Harvard also agreed to grant "appropriate academic credit," applicable toward graduation, for Army ROTC courses.
The 1966 Army contract was little more than a formality, since the arrangement for which it provided has already been in existence here for nearly fifty years. But what is interesting about it is the formal emphasis placed by the Army on the status of the ROTC unit within the University. Like the older Navy and Air Force agreements, the Army contract specifies repeatedly that the Department of Military Science is to be considered an integral part of the University, on full administrative parity with all other Harvard departments. The head of the Department is to be designated as a full professor and voting member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (this was not included in the contract, as it is already required by the ROTC Vitalization Act). ROTC courses are to be scheduled so as "to make it equally convenient for students to participate in Army ROTC as in other courses at the same educational level," and they are to be given full academic credit toward a Harvard degree.
Most of these requirements are of little practical significance for the ROTC units at Harvard. Academic credit is clearly not vital to the survival of the ROTC programs, as most students do not actually use their ROTC courses for graduation credit. The military professorships give no real additional power to their holders. And while the Departmental status of the ROTC units does entitle them to free facilities and secretarial services at Shannon Hall, Harvard's outlay for these purposes is dwarfed by the nearly $250,000 provided annually by ROTC scholarships. The services' desire for departmental status cannot be explained by financial or academic considerations.
What the services do obtain through departmental status at Harvard is legitimacy and prestige. The prseent status of ROTC in any American college enhances both the program and the prospect of a military career, for it suggests a kind of basic ideological unity between American education and the armed forces: it helps make the military respectable in the college by integrating it with the college. And the present status of ROTC at a prestigious university like Harvard has the further function of helping to legitimize its status everywhere else.
The prestige of ROTC's position facilitates the military's "informational activities" within the university. The more prestigious its status, the more easily will it attract top students into military careers. Thus, given the services' need for a steady inflow of educated talent if huge, swiftly-deployable forces are to be maintained at all times, the value of the present arrangement with the universities becomes, from a military standpoint, quite clear.
III
But for the universities, it is an arrangement troubled wtih contradiction and compromise. While the University has ostensibly integrated ROTC into its administrative structure, the ROTC departments are necessarily unable to adhere to the standards and norms of Harvard -- and indeed, of civilian higher education in general.
The conflict shows through in the problem of ultimate control over academic decisions. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is Harvard's highest academic authority, but unlike every other department, Harvard's three military departments are not ultimately bound by its decisions. The ROTC departments do work closely with Faculty representatives and the Faculty has theoretically retained some control over ROTC curricula. However, in such basic matters as the exclusion of ROTC students before they have received their commissions, the unit commander, and not the Faculty, must have the final word.
Another problem stems from the fact that the military departments--unlike any other Harvard department--are parts of larger formal organizations which need college-educated men. This, of course, is the whole problem of recruitment: the armed services, through their ROTC departments, have a kind of special access to the University and to its students which is denied to every other organization.
The commanders of Harvard's ROTC units appear to recognize these problems, but they are not really ROTC's problems. The armed forces which they represent were invited to come to Harvard by the University, and until Harvard tells them differently, they can assume that they are still welcome.
"I have two masters," Col. R. H. Pell, Harvard's current Professor of Military Science, has said. "I'm proud of the fact that I am a part of Harvard, right along with the larger master I have been serving for twenty-eight years." But the long partnership of he two masters is an increasingly uneasy one, and the smaller master is beginning to feel the strain