NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 24 — Today vigorous opposition to Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) filled the auditorium at the College of Staten Island (CSI) campus of the City University of New York (CUNY), where the Administration had been forced by anti-ROTC faculty to call a Town Hall meeting. CUNY administrators are determined to impose ROTC on this campus as well as at York and City Colleges. ROTC was thrown out of CUNY during the protests against the Vietnam War and has been gone since 1971.
A growing movement of students and faculty against the militarization of CUNY has targeted the administration for trying to bring back ROTC as well as for hiring former general and CIA director David Petraeus to teach at the elitist Macaulay “Honors” College. At the Town Hall meeting, among the dozen CSI faculty or staff who spoke, not a single one supported ROTC. PL’ers in this movement believe that we need to link the concepts of fascism and imperialism to understand the current militarization of universities (see box).
A few students spoke in favor of ROTC, for their right to choose, and the character-building, career opportunities, and freedom from debt they said ROTC brings to working-class students. Other students pointed out what’s missing from this rosy picture: ROTC trains officers for a military which uses the 1,000 U.S. bases in 130 countries around the world to kill people by the hundreds of thousands and send back home thousands of dead, maimed, and psychologically devastated U.S. vets. Killing and dying is the name of ROTC’s racist game as it tries to recruit, especially, black and brown CUNY students to their killing machine.
The panel of speakers included two recent anti-ROTC vets and a student leader of the CUNY anti-militarization movement. The unimpressive speakers for ROTC included a regional ROTC officer, the head of ROTC at City College, and a faculty member from York College. The latter spoke proudly about the new War Sciences curriculum at York, allegedly to be academically respectable and to develop critical thinking.
Their pro-ROTC views were echoed by very few. Many questions came from the floor. What about U.S. military sexism and the rape and assault inflicted on a third of women soldiers? The weak answer was, “We only speak for ROTC, not for military policy in general.”
What about U.S. use of chemical weapons like napalm, depleted uranium, and white phosphorus? “We only speak for ROTC, not for the military as a whole.”
What about the illegal imperialist invasions and occupations, the drone strikes, the targeted assassination of U.S. citizens, torture and renditions, Guantanamo, and more? “We only speak for ROTC.” By the end, ROTC hypocrisy, lies, and evasions were exposed to everyone.
The anti-ROTC views were varied. Some faculty said that their ideals of bringing mass democratic college education to CUNY students were the exact opposite of the inhumane ideals of the military. They pointed out that building character and critical thinking was the province of educators, not military recruiters.
Others objected to using their university to legitimize a military discredited by war crimes. One or two blasted U.S. imperialism as the real explanation of the recent role of the military. They correctly stated that ROTC should be kept out because the university has used military recruiting to support and enforce imperialist foreign policy, beginning with genocide against indigenous people in the Americas. One student described the racism he experiences every day at the hands of the New York police, and said the U.S. military is doing the same thing to his sisters and brothers overseas. The antiwar vets were eloquent about the abuses they saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and how their own thinking had changed. The student activist linked ROTC to Petraeus, Department of Defense research at CUNY, and pro-war curriculum.
The next step will probably be a debate in the Academic Senate. Faculty are angry at growing administration arrogance taking away their authority over academic matters like curriculum and departmental organization.
They see the imposition of ROTC on the campus as another example of university managers seizing more control. They understand that it is the CUNY bosses who are responsible for militarization.
Students connect more immediately to the racism of ROTC’s plans at CUNY because many of them experience racism every day. The ROTC move and the Petraeus hiring have exposed to some students the CUNY administration’s function of enforcing capitalist class rule. This movement must grow both in numbers and in political understanding, as PLP at CUNY forms communist study-action groups and distributes more CHALLENGEs.
