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Critical Mass: Bollinger doesn’t get it
Or maybe he does -- and he just doesn't care. Here he is on the subject of Columbia ROTC:
In 2005, the University Senate voted overwhelmingly against formally inviting ROTC onto campus. Senate members may have had a variety of reasons for their votes, but the record and official reports make it reasonably clear that the predominant reason was one of adhering to a core principle of the University: that we will not have programs on the campus that discriminate against students on the basis of such categories as race, gender, military veteran status, or sexual orientation. Under the current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the Defense Department, openly gay and lesbian students could or would be excluded from participating in ROTC activities. That is inconsistent with the fundamental values of the University. A number of our peer institutions have taken a similar position.
That's from an email he sent out to the whole campus yesterday; it's his response to the fact that at a recent campus forum on service, both presidential candidates expressed their opinion that Columbia is wrong to continue banning ROTC from campus. The statements of Senators Obama and McCain drew widespread media attention, and even led to staff editorials at the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal echoing their position that it's really time to stop using students as pawns in campus-based protests against DADT.
The Columbia community was energized by all of this. Today the University Senate meets to discuss ROTC, and students are meeting to decide whether they should seek to restore naval ROTC to campus.
Bollinger's email looks like a pre-emptive strike against any such effort. He argues against ROTC--and he bends the truth to do it when he describes DADT as a "policy of the Defense Department." I've said it before and I will say it again: DADT is the creation of Congress, not the military; students, faculty, and administrators should feel free to protest it, but they ought to aim their protests in the right direction. It is time to end DADT; the majority of Americans want to see it repealed; even major military figures are speaking out about it now. It's wrong--and quite possibly a problem, vis a vis the Solomon Amendment, which, in the fine print, covers ROTC as well as military recruiters--for Bollinger to announce that Columbia is barring ROTC from campus for political reasons.
Is Bollinger ignorant? Is he wilfully obfuscating? Whatever he's doing, he's not being principled. Still, it's instructive to see such an explicit statement of how much more institutional political posturing matters than students' rights to choose their activities, their service, their career paths, and their beliefs for themselves. Leopards, spots.
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