The Daily Joins The Review in Calling for ROTC’s Return to Stanford

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ROTC at Stanford? If that doesn’t sound familiar, I’m not surprised. Many students are completely unaware that there are Stanford students doing double duty as ROTC cadets. That is because officially, ROTC has been MIA on campus for nearly *40 years. *40 years ago, the University ejected ROTC’s from campus in a poorly disguised protest against the Vietnam war. (Indeed, the University took similar action to eliminate U.S. JAG Recruiters from campus in response to the same war, and the law school continues to make military recruiting difficult on campus, [as I reported last year](http://stanfordreview.org/article/is-stanford-law-quashing-military-recruiters).)

But today, ROTC faces the prospect of reinstatement on campus. The Faculty Senate will decide whether ROTC will be allowed back on campus, but according to the University, the decision likely hinges on the fate of a single government policy — “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The Congress-enacted law prevents openly-gay people from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

In the most recent issue of* The Stanford Review*, our paper’s Editorial Board argued that ROTC students are prevented from becoming full members of this community because cadets receive no official acknowledgment, no support through official University channels, and are unduly burdened by University-placed barriers. Such barriers include having to travel as far away as Berkeley for training multiple times every week and receiving no academic credit for their leadership training while other students receive credit for all kinds of activities. And these students suffer because of policy over which neither they, nor the military, have any control. Their fellow students should be rallying behind ROTC cadet, not further perpetuating their University-approved outcast statuses.

For a long time, *The Stanford Review *was the only campus publication and one of the few student-driven voices reporting on ROTC at Stanford and calling for its return. (See here, here, and here for examples.) While I was proud to see *The Review *cover such an important campus issue so well, I was also disheartened. We championed the correct stance, but we did so with little student support. Well today another voice joined the fight. In today’s issue of The Stanford Daily,**the paper’s Editorial Board published an editorial that urged the University to bring ROTC back to Campus.

This is exactly what we wanted to see when we called for students to rally behind their ROTC classmates, their fellow Stanford students. This is a great move by The Daily, and I fully support it. On this issue, The Daily is standing behind students and the hypocrisy of a University which prides itself on public service but rejects some of the students most dedicated to public service.

So I applaud *The Stanford Daily *and issue another call to the larger student body. Make the choice to reinstate ROTC students as full members of the Stanford community. It’s about time.