But neither the administrators nor the Verbareport are consistent with the objection to ROTCthat officials expressed in 1990. Then, theFaculty Council said the presence of ROTC studentson campus contradicts University policy againstdiscrimination.

An Abdication?

In the spring of 1990, the campus was outragedby the story of David E. Carney '89. As anundergraduate, Carney served in the Navy ROTCprogram. In early 1990 Carney then doing graduatestudies at Oxford University, informed themilitary that he was gay.

The military moved to give him a dishonorabledischarge and asked him to return $51,000 intuition provided him by the ROTC program.

In May 1990 and angry Faculty Council said ithad "strong objections to [current] discriminatorypolices" of ROTC.

The full Faculty then gave the Department ofDefense a two year ultimatum to make "progress inresolving the issues of discrimination.' Otherwisethe Council statement said, the college wouldsuspend the participation of its students in ROTC.

These were not words of compromise.

And in June, then-President Derek C. Bok chimedin. He wrote a letter to then Secretary of DefenseRichard Cheney urging the military to reconsiderits policies.

"As you can imagine," the president wrote, "itis difficult for us to reconcile ROTC with ourpolicies of nondiscrimination."

In the past year, However, it has apparentlybecome easier for the University to stomach justsuch a reconciliation.

Comments made this week by Provost Jerry R.Green vividly illustrated the distinction thatHarvard administrators and faculty have lined upbehind: the University won't stand againstdiscrimination on its campus--it just won't pay tosupport it.

"If you got a scholarship from the ViolinSociety of America subject to the fact that youcontinue to take violin lessons and the violinsociety discriminated against certain kinds ofpeople," Green said, "we wouldn't have any problemwith that."

"We might not like that but we wouldn't stopyou," Green said. "If Harvard has to pay a certainshare of those violin lessons then they're goingto have a problem."

This is the same straddle used by the Verbareport, which was released in 1992 and endorsed bythe Faculty last year in the wake of theinvitation to Gen. Colin L. Powell to speak atCommencement.

That report which suggested the cessation ofpayment by Harvard to the MIT program representeda significant break from what the Faculty Councilsaid in 1990.