The ROTC Ban Myth Strikes Again

KC Johnson at Minding the Campus is wrong on two points. He is simply mistaken when he writes, "the universities banned ROTC." Neither Brown nor any other university banned ROTC. As I wrote on Academe Blog, the banning of ROTC is a myth.

Johnson claims, "There never was a coherent intellectual rationale for Brown’s policy." This is false. There is a clear intellectual rationale. One issue is equality, and the continuing ban on transgender soldiers is a continuation of concern about supporting bias against Brown students. But the primary intellectual rationale is that the faculty should decide faculty hiring and control the curriculum. In 1969, this was the reason why the military withdrew ROTC from Brown, and the faculty were right then and they're right today.