Baker said last month that the Pentagon has no plans to station a full-fledged battalion at Harvard. “It’s too much of an investment,” Baker said.
In an interview with The Crimson last week, Summers declined to comment on his meetings with Baker. But in the past he has made no secret of his support for ROTC.
In January 2002, he blasted the anonymous donor arrangement with MIT as an “uncomfortable, back-door policy inconsistent with transparency.”
And that June, Summers became the first Harvard president to attend a ROTC commissioning ceremony since 1969.
For senior cadets about to ship off to far-flung locales, Summers’ consistent presence at the commissioning ceremonies is “very encouraging,” said soon-to-be Second Lt. Elliott N. Neal ’05, who has been assigned to the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy.
“It shows that Harvard respects thae individuals who will be going into the uniformed services,” said Kyle E. Scherer ’05, who plans to participate in today’s ceremony but will not receive his officer commission until he completes a leadership-training program next month.
Neal said that having an Army officer on campus might allow Harvard cadets to conduct some exercises—such as uniform inspections or drilling practice—without trekking to MIT.
“I’m in favor of anything that would help students participate in ROTC because it’s the best thing I’ve done at Harvard,” Neal said.
But some say a ROTC office on campus might prove to be a double-edged sword for the armed services.
“I think the space might give a particularly vivid focus to demonstrations against the war on Iraq and against the U.S. government’s revolting class-based treatment of its enlisted personnel,” said John Womack Jr. ’59, an outspoken faculty critic of U.S. foreign policy, who is Bliss professor of Latin American history and economics.
Four Ivy League schools—Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, and Princeton—currently allow ROTC programs to train on campus. Columbia’s University Senate, a student-faculty policy-making body that makes recommendations to the Board of Trustees, last month overwhelmingly rejected a resolution to restore ROTC at the university.
—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.