Letter to the Editor: Academic Freedom on Campus

From an e-mail correspondent:

Professor McAdams,

First, though I doubt you would remember me, I am a 1990 graduate of Marquette’s Political Science Program. . . . Since then I taught for Milwaukee Public Schools as a Middle School teacher for 6 years, but because I went through Army ROTC while at Marquette I was able to switch professions in 1998 to Active Duty. Sadly, the reason for changing was that the day I stepped out of the classroom and into a uniform I doubled my income (though that is a different topic of conversation). To make a long story short, I have since then taught ROTC at UW-Madison (where I received a Masters Degree in Public Affairs) for three years, and am now the Commander of the UW-Stevens Point ROTC Department.

It is for this reason that I am responding to your blog. Having been a student and an Assistant Professor of Military Science at UW-Madison, I was continually struck by the open hostility to ROTC at Madison. I still remember when Donna Shalala was the Chancellor at Madison and brought the entire faculty together to vote on ROTC remaining on campus, fully knowing that as a land grant institution she was mandated to keep ROTC.

The vote was 63% for shutting the ROTC programs at Madison. When I was teaching there, it was not “healthy?” to wear my uniform across campus because of the response I would receive. Additionally, when we tried to put either letters to the editor or advertising in the Cardinal or other campus papers we were always denied access. Then, I would hear back from the cadets that if they wore the uniform to class, other students would make comments on why anyone would ever want to “learn to kill people for a living?”

It was my experience there that the faculty actively educates the underclassmen on how to think about specific subjects, and though this is not universal across the campus, there is no one who would be able to say that the education is not biased. This fact was a steady topic of conversation among our cadets. It is important to note here that my experience was not based solely on hearsay. I personally had faculty approach me and ask derisively “What are you doing here?”

I would like to compare/contrast this to my experience at Marquette and now at UW-Stevens Point. At Marquette, though there were individual students who would on occasion make negative comments, I always felt that the faculty as a whole was either neutral or supportive to cadets in ROTC. At Stevens Point, I have noted a similar attitude.

The reason I wish to bring out this contrast is that your article seems to point towards a certain universal oppression of free speech at Universities, but I would argue that the most damaging incidents occur by the indoctrination of students while they are still forming their outlook on the world by professors whom they trust at specific institutions.

When ideas from any side are dismissed without real debate or analysis because they originate from a suspect source (the government, the Right, ROTC...) then the development of students analytical capacity is stunted. I know that UW-Madison’s leadership believes that it is a bastion for free thought, and that it teaches personal responsibility for the information one accepts as real, the reality may be very different because they do not really see what is going on in the liberal arts classrooms forming the central curriculum of the University. What I saw was the campus wide results. It would be hard to convince me that these students arrived on campus with a predisposition to hating their Army and towards Officership and military service in it. Those ideas are learned and taught.

My conclusion is simple, oppression of free speech is not universal on campuses around the country, but is often most prominent in those places where people would most like to think they are free. UW-Madison is one example of this.

Thank you for the education that you helped to give me at Marquette, and I will continue to read your blog as a fine source of thought provoking informative editorials.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey Kurka
Lieutenant Colonel US Army
Professor of Military Science UW-Stevens Point

We are delighted to hear from a former student, and entirely agree with his observations.

When we blog about intolerance and censorship in academia nationally, and about cases at Marquette, we don’t mean to imply that Marquette is worse than other institutions. Indeed, since Marquette is more conservative than lots of other universities, it’s also more tolerant and open to diverse points of view.

Of course, there are places on campus where politically correct intolerance prevails, but they are pretty much the places (humanities departments, education, victim studies programs) where intolerance prevails throughout academia generally.

Where ROTC is concerned, we have blogged about how anti-ROTC protests have been poorly attended and failed to find a sympathetic audience among administrators or even the usual suspects among student activists.

So while Marquette could be better, it could be worse too.

Hatred of the Military: No Peace for Students

From the Los Angeles Times, an account of how leftist teachers in the Los Angeles area are attacking Junior ROTC, sometimes to the point of personal harassment of students enrolled in the program.

First Sgt. Otto Harrington — tall, muscular, his head cleanshaven — has soldiered through battles in Bosnia, Kuwait and Somalia. He has patrolled Korea’s DMZ.

None of that prepared him, though, for the attacks he has faced as senior teacher in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, where students and teachers have launched a crusade against military recruiting and JROTC.

Harrington blames their campaign for cutting the number of cadets at Roosevelt by 43% in four years, from 286 to 162. Some teachers urge students not to sign up for JROTC, he said, and have worked to end involuntarily placement in the program.

“They seem to think I’m some evil, horrible soldier down here trying to sacrifice our kids to Iraq,” Harrington said in describing the increasing tensions on the Eastside campus.

The program’s critics see JROTC as a Trojan horse targeting students in low-income minority schools with high dropout rates. “We are a juicy target,” said Roosevelt social studies teacher Jorge Lopez.

At Roosevelt and other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the anti-JROTC movement has helped drive a 24% drop in enrollment since 2003-04, Harrington and his critics said. The decline runs counter to enrollment nationwide, which grew 8% to 486,594 cadets between 2001 and 2006, fueled by a 57% jump in federal funding, according to the Department of Defense.

This propaganda clearly has had an effect on students.

Roosevelt 11th-grader Jesse Flores said that as recently as his freshman year, students didn’t think less of kids for being in JROTC; some even stopped cadets to admire ribbons and medals pinned to their uniforms. “Now,” Jesse said, “everyone says JROTC is bad.”

Many teachers are openly hostile toward JROTC, Jesse said, and some wear T-shirts that say “A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind.”

Arlene Inouye, a speech therapist formerly at Roosevelt, said she thinks anti-military advocacy by teachers is a counterbalance to a strong military presence on campus. She said she once counted 14 recruiters approaching lunchtime crowds of students in Roosevelt’s quad, handing out “Join the Army” book covers and promising adventure, travel and money for college.

In 2003, concerned that students weren’t hearing the other side, she founded the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools. The group has spread to 50 Los Angeles-area schools, providing member teachers with literature, speakers, films and books.

Nearly two dozen teachers have also shown the films “Arlington West,” put out by Veterans for Peace, and “The Ground Truth,” a documentary in which veterans condemn the war in Iraq and their treatment by the military on their return home.

Lopez, the social studies teacher, keeps a stack of glossy brochures propped on his chalkboard titled “Don’t Die in a Dead-End Job! Information for Young People Considering the Military” that show a soldier saluting flag-draped coffins. Prominent on his wall is a poster called “Ten Points to Consider Before You Sign a Military Enlistment Agreement.”

“I want to see more Latinos go to college,” Lopez said.

Of course, one of the best ways for young people from poor families to go to college is with the financial aid that the military offers. But Lopez, obviously, has a rather different agenda.

The students in the program, unlike the leftist activists, like the program.

“For some students, the biggest reason to come to school is for JROTC,” said Harrington, noting that his students often come in at 6:30 a.m. even when they are on vacation.

Daniel Segura, a soft-spoken 16-year-old with a mop of brown hair and an easy smile, is one of them. He said his grades spiraled after his father died of diabetes two years ago. “I felt there was no point,” he said.

He started ditching class to go to the Santa Monica Pier and failed half his classes. Urged by a counselor to enroll in JROTC, he was at first resistant and defiant during class time. Harrington told him not to attend the program, then agreed to give him another chance if he followed the rules.

Slowly, Harrington gave Daniel more responsibility, putting him on the flag and armed drill teams and on JROTC’s courtesy patrol, which helps translate for parents at teacher conferences.

Hoping to be named to the JROTC staff and earn more responsibility, Daniel said, he plans to pass all his classes this semester and is getting a B in English.

Roosevelt students tell him he is being brainwashed to go into the Army, but he said he thinks they don’t understand what the program really is. It has taught him leadership and discipline, he said, and he has thrived on its boundaries and rules.

In a bewildering school with nearly 5,000 students, JROTC has been a beacon, a place to belong.

“JROTC made me try again,” he said. Several JROTC cadets describe feeling as if they are under hostile fire from anti-military teachers.

Last year, Jesse, the 11th-grader, a master sergeant and JROTC flag detail commander, was the only student wearing a JROTC uniform in Martha Guerrero’s first-period world history class. He said that Guerrero, who often wears a “War is not the answer” T-shirt and has a flag of the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara hanging in her classroom, sometimes asked him pointed questions in the middle of class.

“Jesse, are you going to go to Iraq and die?” she asked. “Why are you wearing a uniform? Aren’t you embarrassed?” Jesse said he felt singled out by the question and told his JROTC instructor about it.

Angered by what he saw as bullying of his student, he confronted Guerrero, who apologized to Jesse. She said she wasn’t harassing the student. “I just tell them things I know are right or wrong. I stand against war, against JROTC.”

But unfortunately, she’s not tolerant of students who disagree with her.

The irony here is huge. These are the leftists who think that teenagers can make their own decisions about having sex, and that teenage girls are quite mature enough to decide whether to have an abortion, but they don’t trust students to make up their own minds about the military.