ROTC returns to Harvard campus
Program had been banned since the 1960s
BOSTON – Harvard University is welcoming the Reserve Officer Training Corps program back to campus after a four-decade banishment caused by dissent over the Vietnam War and disagreement on military policy toward gays.
The move by Harvard comes just months after Congress in December repealed the military ban on gays serving openly.
Today, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus are scheduled to sign an agreement that will establish the Naval ROTC’s formal presence on the Cambridge campus.
Under the agreement, a director of Naval ROTC at Harvard will be appointed, and the university will resume funding the program, which will be given office space and access to athletic fields and classrooms.
Harvard cadets will still train, as they have for years, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also located in Cambridge, just outside of Boston. Currently, 20 Harvard students participate in ROTC, including 10 involved in Naval ROTC.
Harvard is the first elite school to agree to rescind its ban since December, when Congress issued its decision about the military policy on gays.
Harvard and several other prominent schools, including Stanford, Yale and Columbia, had kept the Vietnam-era ROTC ban in place following the war because they viewed the military policy forbidding gays from serving openly as discriminatory. The 17-year-old policy requires soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to keep their homosexuality a secret or face dismissal.