A potentially bruising battle over the future of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at Harvard was postponed this year after the chief of the Army’s battalion at MIT backed away from plans to request office space in the Yard.

Lt. Col. Brian L. Baker, whose Paul Revere Battalion at MIT includes cadets from Harvard, said last fall that he would ask University President Lawrence H. Summers to allow the Army to post a captain and a sergeant on campus.

“I will meet with President Summers this spring to discuss this very issue and intend to request he allow/enable us to take this next step, necessary to double our enrollment by 2008,” Baker told Advocates for Harvard ROTC, a group led by alumni and retired military officers, in a November 2004 speech.

But more than six months later, Baker has yet to bring his request to the University president.

This morning, Summers will attend a Tercentenary Theater ceremony at which seven senior cadets from Harvard will receive their commissions—three from the Army, three from the Navy, and one from the Air Force.

Summers has emerged as an outspoken backer of the officer training program since his arrival at Mass. Hall in 2001. But, last July, he said in a private meeting that he was “not prepared” to make the argument for ROTC space on campus, according to Baker.

Some faculty members are likely to object to any attempt to establish a ROTC office at Harvard. “I wouldn’t wish military service in Iraq on anyone,” Paul F. Hoffman, the Hooper professor of geology, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “So I am opposed to military recruitment on campus or anywhere else for the purpose of perpetuating the occupation.”

Baker said last month—after the Faculty passed a resolution in March expressing its “lack of confidence” in Summers’ leadership—that the Army would not issue a request for an office at Harvard.

“[Summers] has quite a bit on his plate now, so it’s probably not optimal to bring that to him now,” Baker told The Crimson in an interview.

“I just assume give the man some breathing room. He’ll find an opportunity to help us,” Baker said.

Baker, who will retire this year after a quarter-century career in the Army, has led the battalion at MIT for the past half-decade.

Harvard has not hosted an officer training program since 1971, two years after the Faculty, expressing its opposition to the Vietnam War, voted to bar ROTC from using campus space.

Student cadets subsequently traveled to MIT to participate in ROTC, with Harvard picking up part of the tab for the program’s costs.

But, in 1993, the Faculty voted to cut off funding for ROTC to protest the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Now, three anonymous alums pay Harvard’s “fair share” of the MIT program’s cost, according to Baker.