“The people who were appealing for gay rights had essentially a patriotic cause,” Segal says. “They weren’t an anti-military movement.”
Meanwhile, the lack of an official ROTC presence at Harvard kept it from the campus consciousness.
While Seth W. Moulton ’01 did not participate in ROTC during his time at Harvard, he remembers his friends’ surprise when he announced in the spring of his senior year that he intended to enlist after graduation. Then, the military was just not seen as a viable career option.
“Making the decision to serve is hard, and when all your friends are going to New York anyway, it’s just very convenient to go work in an investment bank,” Moulton says.
RESURGENCE
A few months after Moulton enlisted, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and Pentagon once again shifted the discourse around the military at Harvard. In some ways, Moulton explains, his friends’ increased interest in enlisting after September 11, despite their surprise at his choice just a few months before, vindicated his decision to join.
Like WWII before it resulted in increased respect and admiration for the military, the outpouring of patriotism stemming from the attacks of 9/11 changed the military’s profile in this country.
“We grew up in the shadow of 9/11, and I joined the army because of 9/11,” Army Cadet Christopher W. Higgins ’11 says. “It’s something that was really ingrained in us as a generation.”
Despite an increased respect for the military, its presence on campus remained minimal after 9/11. In all three programs, roughly 20 Harvard undergraduates across all four grade levels participate in ROTC every year—down from around 100 students per class in the two immediate decades following WWII.
Current ROTC cadets at Harvard say they feel that their peers’ attitudes toward their decision to join the corps range from support to relative indifference but note that they see no open hostility.
“It’s kind of like benign neglect,” Higgins says.
Much of this trend away from open disagreement with the military as an institution represents the flip side of the patriotism sparked by the events of September 2001. While it has become socially acceptable to oppose the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, the slogan “support our troops” has become an unassailable maxim of American life.
“What we tend to do is to equate our respect for the people who were affected by 9/11 with this idea that the military is not open to criticism,” explains Diane H. Mazur, a former Air Force officer and a professor of law at the University of Florida. “Forty years ago there was much more social latitude to openly disagree.”
Amid this relatively tacit acceptance of the military, the debate over ROTC at Harvard during the past decade has shifted toward ensuring that more people are to join the program, rather than disagreement over foreign policy or outright pacifism. Now, opposition to the military’s presence is predicated on the ideal that military service is something to be lauded and open to everyone and that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and restrictions on trans identified individuals to serve violates this principle.
Pacifism, or any other variant of anti-militarism, seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Today, English Professor Louis Menand shows home-shot footage of the 1969 Harvard protests to his perennially popular class U.S. in the World 23: “Art and Thought in the Cold War.” But for many of his students, this protest ethic is a foreign concept.
“They got beat up by the cops, they got arrested,” Menand says. “Students are surprised to see how active and engaged students were in those days.”
—Staff writer Stephanie B. Garlock can be reached at sgarlock@college.harvard.edu.