Is Harvard Smart Enough to Listen to its Students?

Forty years ago this month, after anti-war riots in Harvard Square, the United States military was officially banned from recruiting and training students to serve as officers at the nation's most famous institution of higher learning.

The Ivy League and many other elite liberal institutions had similar reactions. But Harvard University's ouster of the Reserve Officers Training Corps quickly became–and has remained–a stinging, gnawing sign for conservatives and veterans, a symbol of a pampered elite that wants all the benefits of freedom without having to pay any of the price.

But neither that perception, nor Harvard's ban of ROTC, may survive the current generation of students. Poll after poll reveals today's college students, and not just those at Harvard, to be indelibly devoted to public service. These "Millennials," as they are known, volunteer, vote, and serve. Conservatives couldn't help but notice with dismay that in 2008 they voted disproportionately for Barack Obama. But liberals should take note when contemplating the Millennials: theirs is not a reflexive, anti-American liberalism. Far from it.

An eye-opening new survey done by the Harvard Republican Club reveals an overwhelming desire to repeal the ban against ROTC. The Millennials are trying to speak to their elders. Are the Baby Boomers sharp enough to listen?

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In April 1969, 135 left-wing Harvard students associated with a radical group known as Students for a Democratic Society did a most undemocratic thing. They stormed the administrative offices located in University Hall in Harvard Yard, occupied the building, cut the phone lines, and issued six demands.

Those demands ranged from the preservation of apartment buildings that were being razed to make room for the John F. Kennedy School of Government to abolishing the presence on campus of ROTC. Make no mistake: Getting rid of ROTC was the only real demand. The rest were window dressing.

Less than 24 hours later, the Harvard administration called in the state police to rid University Hall of the rioters, but in the aftermath, the liberal faculty at Harvard reacted in a most illiberal way. They caved in and voted to ban ROTC.

Pacifism was a historic departure for Harvard. Its ROTC program was the oldest in the nation. At the school's Memorial Hall, the name of every Harvard man who paid the ultimate price in the Civil War is engraved in the walls. The Memorial Church at the north end of Harvard Square was dedicated on Armistice Day 1932 in memory of the Harvard men who had perished in World War I. The "war to end all wars" did not fulfill its stated premise, of course, and in ensuing decades the names of other Harvard graduates have filled up the space on the church's walls. The first name listed among the casualties of World War II is Franklin Roosevelt, class of 1904, who died on duty as commander-in-chief of our forces in the Pacific.

As fighting for country became less appealing to elites, the list of names of Harvard grads cut down in battle in subsequent wars dwindled. Then, Vietnam resulted in the university officially walling off the military. Yet students are stubborn. Even before that conflict ended, a Harvard football star and science buff named Charles V. DePriest worked around the ban, enrolling for his ROTC classes a couple of miles down the Charles River at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Perhaps because DePriest had already figured out how to circumvent the ban, or perhaps because his great grandfather was the first African-American elected to Congress in the 20^th century, Harvard president Derek Bok (an Army veteran himself) approved the arrangement with M.I.T.

Bok is to be commended for that much, but nothing has changed since then. To this day, M.I.T. is where Harvard students who want to be military officers must go to train. They receive no credit for their coursework as they would for nearly any other class at M.I.T. This did not change when the Vietnam War ended. It did not change when the United States and Vietnam resumed diplomatic relations. It did not change when the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. As recently as this year, when a female ROTC student was forced by the exigencies of her schedule to attend one of her Harvard classes in uniform, her professor asked, in front of the class, "What are you?"

A better question could be asked of Harvard's faculty itself: What are you?

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The Harvard survey on ROTC was patterned after a vote conducted last year by Columbia University. At Columbia, the proposition for admitting ROTC failed very narrowly. Not so in Cambridge.

The poll, conducted by the Harvard Republican Club, was a survey, not a referendum. Also, because of the self-selecting nature of the sample, the survey's authors cannot claim to have obtained exact, or even perfectly scientific, results. What the campus conservatives can claim, simply because of the sheer volume of the response, is to have their fingers on the pulse of the student body. Some 1,700 students answered a general e-mail that went to every undergraduate. This represents 25 percent of the student body. Of that number, 62 percent said they believed Harvard should "officially recognize" ROTC on their campus, with only 34.3 percent opposed. The rest had no preference.

"Faculty policy is out-of-touch with student opinion," Colin Motley, president of the Harvard Republican Club told me in an e-mail. "Almost two-thirds of those students with an opinion on the issue support official recognition of ROTC, yet the faculty refuses to officially recognize the program."

Young Mr. Motley makes a good case. The Harvard Republican Club's tally does not appear to be skewed significantly because of the sample, as only 18.9 percent of those who responded identified themselves as Republican. I spent a semester teaching a course at the Kennedy School a couple of years ago, and even this low percentage seems a little high to me, but no matter. ROTC enjoyed a majority of support among self-identified Democrats, Independents, and Republicans in the survey.

None of this surprises John Della Volpe, the resident pollster of Harvard's Institute of Politics. Della Volpe, who happens to be a lifelong Democrat, is a pioneer in the art of doing online polling of Millennials, and he did an extensive survey of the political opinions of under-30s for me last year, when I was the Washington bureau chief of Reader's Digest. That poll all but predicted the huge levels of support young people would give Obama in both the Democratic primaries and general election.

Armed with the Harvard Republicans' poll, I called John this week. He laughed knowingly when I told him what I wanted to write about. He told me of a telling encounter he had recently with a Harvard senior, a dedicated young man whose parents are from Taiwan.

"What are your plans?" he asked the student.

"I'm going to join the U.S. Marine Corps," the student replied. "They need people like me."

Two weeks ago, at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, a graduate student named Maura Sullivan made the same point during a public event attended by David Ellwood, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, and U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus.

Sullivan served five years in the Marines, even pulling duty in a combat zone when her unit was assigned to Fallujah. Noting that President Obama was, as she spoke, signing into law the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, Sullivan made the point that in addition to AmeriCorps volunteers and Teach for America, we still need those who are willing to risk everything for their country.

"These are critical times. The nation is fighting two wars," she said. "At a time the president is asking all of us to think of the greater good...frankly, you want your best and brightest addressing these problems."

Petraeus applauded the young woman, but so did every student in the auditorium. Such sentiments are widespread on the Harvard campus, as they are among an entire demographic cohort.

"This whole generation–they're pro-public service, and they have the utmost respect for the military," Della Volpe told me. Even, I asked him, with Afghanistan going so badly, and with support eroding for the war in Iraq? "Students today are just very service-minded, and they trust the military as an institution," he replied. "It's not about the war, it's about the warriors."

In June, Petraeus is scheduled to speak at the commissioning ceremony in Harvard Yard for the graduating cadets and midshipmen who train over at M.I.T. Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust will almost certainly be present. She was there last year and told the students that she wished there were more of them.

Well, there certainly would be more if Harvard welcomed them on campus. This Faust is unwilling to do, for the same stated reason the Harvard faculty won't budge: the U.S. military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

Codified into law during Bill Clinton's first term, this guideline was a compromise between those who wanted to open military service to openly gay soldiers, sailors, and Marines, and traditionalists who believed that homosexuality creates morale problems in the ranks. As a rationale for barring ROTC, the gay ban was initially nothing more than a fig leaf for most longtime leftist critics of the U.S. military. It has developed into something more among some educators, however, and many students as well.

In fact, the great irony of this surge of support for ROTC in the post-9/11 generation of students is that they are far more supportive of gay rights than their parents. Unlike their elders, however, they seem to have room enough in their hearts for gay rights and those who raise their hand to serve in America's all-volunteer armed forces.

I've only met her at a large reception, but I certainly put Drew Faust in the principled camp on this issue. Lawrence Summers, Faust's controversial predecessor, had made ROTC inclusion one of his causes, and although the faculty ran him out of the Harvard presidency on other grounds, it was yet another reason some of the tenured crowd had it in for Summers.

Although Faust is too smart a politician to get on the wrong side of gay politics on campus, neither does she seem hostile to the military. "This Republic of Suffering," her brilliant 2008 book about death and dying during the Civil War, contains some of the most sensitive and poignant prose ever written about the American combat soldier. Yet it's not easy for any college president to appear to endorse discrimination, which is how the issue has been framed, at least in college administration offices and faculty lounges. (Harvard's official handbook for students reads, "Current federal policy of excluding known lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals from admission to ROTC or of discharging them from service is inconsistent with Harvard's values as stated in its policy on discrimination.")

And yet, as a 20-year-old Harvard sophomore from Bay City, Texas, named Mark Alan Isaacson told me this week: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a policy of the federal government, not just the Pentagon, and it was signed by President Clinton. But Harvard doesn't seem to have any trouble taking money from the federal government, and Clinton is certainly welcome any time he comes on campus. So why can't midshipmen and cadets who want to serve their country--and didn't have anything to do with this policy--be welcomed here, too?"

It's a good question.