It would be anticlimactic, to say the least.

After years of vehement protests and angry demonstrations, after months of discussion and delays, the issue of ROTC on campus could be determined by the American public, not the Faculty Council.

When voters choose a president, they will likely also choose a prepackaged policy regarding the military's ban on gays--the focal point of the ROTC debate.

Democrat contender Gov. Bill Clinton has decried the ban as a violation of homosexuals' civil rights. He promises to reverse the policy if elected.

"Bill Clinton will issue executive orders to repeal the ban on gays and lesbians from military or foreign service," read the opening lines of a Clinton policy sheet on issues of concern to gays and lesbians.

The Republican platform, on the other hand, upholds the ban: "We support the continued exclusion of homosexuals from the military as a matter of good order and discipline."

The GOP plank violates Harvard's policy of nondiscrimination. And ROTC opponents say this is reason enough to keep the program off campus.

The ROTC debate did not always center on the military's treatment of gays and lesbians. In fact, when vehement protesters helped to force the organization off campus in the late 1960s, they were concerned with Harvard's ties to the military industrial complex.

Professor of Law Daniel J. Meltzer '72, who was a Harvard undergraduate during the first ROTC debates, says students and professors also worried about academic questions raised by the program. They debated whether ROTC instructors should receive faculty status, and whether ROTC courses should count for Harvard credit.

In the wake of these debates, the Faculty in 1969 eliminated the Harvard program altogether. In 1976, it revamped its policy to form Harvard's current relationship with ROTC, whereby cadets enroll in the ROTC program at MIT.

The faculty committee is now considering whether to recommend severing all ties with ROTC, a step well beyond removing the program from campus.

But in the current controversy, general suspicion and dislike of the military has all but disappeared as an issue.

Few people at Harvard bear any grudge against the Department of Defense per se, says Meltzer, who sits on the student-faculty committee on ROTC. Otherwise, the University might be obliged to reconsider the hundreds of thousands of dollars in Department of Defense grants and fellowships it receives each year.

And many supporters of the status quo interviewed by the committee have cited economics to bolster their argument: that eliminating ROTC scholarships would prevent some financially strapped students from attending Harvard at all.

"The consensus on the committee is that we would like to present the option for Harvard students to...participate in ROTC" if the program complies with the nondiscrimination policy, Meltzer says.