The College Fix

The one ROTC-less (or formerly) school we don’t talk much about on The College Fix is Brown. Since the DADT repeal, Harvard’s done the most to welcome ROTC and the military, with Stanford, Columbia, and Yale setting up new agreements with the armed forces to offer better ROTC opportunities to students.

But Brown’s a little different.

This morning, Brown President Ruth J. Simmons released a 2200-word statement confirming that while she will explore ROTC opportunities with the Department of Defense, they will explicitly not be on campus at Brown:

I therefore endorse the recommendations and majority position of the Committee that we should explore with the Department of Defense whether, under existing academic policies at Brown, opportunities may be created for Brown students to participate in additional cross-institutional ROTC programs elsewhere.

In the statement, Simmons also discusses at length the ban on transgendered people in the military:

We must do all in our power as an institution to carry the message to Congress, the executive branch, and the military establishment that the policy barring transgender individuals from military service must be changed. We have the capacity to mount the arguments, to influence others to assist in bringing the case forward, and to persist with this struggle until the proper ends are achieved.

Although it’s unlikely the military would open shop at Brown to begin with (the military generally uses regional programs for schools with lower student participation), most of Brown’s peers have not ruled out trying to bring the programs back to campus.

In June, a Brown commission released a report with four recommendations for ROTC:

1. Brown will maintain the 1969 resolutions that ruled ROTC should be considered an extra-curricular program and that military officers teaching in an ROTC program should not be given faculty status based solely on their role in ROTC.
2. Brown should continue its cross-institutional arrangement with the Army ROTC program at Providence College.
3. Simmons should “engage in conversations with the Department of Defense“ about off-campus Naval and Air Force ROTC programs.
4. Any proposal to expand ROTC opportunities be brought back to the faculty.

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