Abstract
One of the items on the agenda of American military sociology for the past several decades has been the relationship between the armed forces and the host society that they serve. In the 1990s, the issue was seen largely as political. A military that was hypothesized to be monolithically conservative and increasingly unresponsive to civilian control led to a program of research that failed to support the basic assumptions of this perception. During the twenty-first century, the problem was redefined as one of public understanding. With only one percent of the population serving in a force composed increasingly of career-oriented volunteers rather than conscripted citizen-soldiers during America’s longest war, both soldiers and civilians were shown to agree that most citizens did not understand military affairs, or the lives of those in uniform, or the veterans who returned from that war to our communities.
Very little theoretical or empirical attention was paid to those social institutions that in the past have helped to weave the military into the fabric of society. One of these was our universities. As Donald Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili report, starting with the American Revolution, universities—and particularly the Ivy League schools—played a significant role in our wars and in our system of civil/military relations. This relationship was reversed during the Vietnam War. Arms and the University addresses the consequences of this reversal, and recent indicators of another change of course.
Only nine universities—primarily the early Ivys—existed at the time of the Revolution, but those that did had an impact on that war. Harvard, for example, offered shelter to soldiers of the Continental Army—and in the Civil War, the Twentieth Volunteer Massachusetts Infantry came to be known as the Harvard Regiment. Many Columbia University students served in the Revolution, and almost half of the class of 1861 enlisted for the Civil War.
Cornell, founded after the Civil War with assistance from the Morrill Act, was organized as a military school, and became moreso in 1918 with the advent of ROTC, a common component of emerging research universities, which incorporated other military education and teaching and research in support of national security in their activities. The involvement of universities in military matters increased during the two World Wars, including increased military funding of research (some of it classified and not added to the public fund of knowledge or included in the teaching mission), government influence on faculty appointments and sometimes, student admissions, and other intrusions that were accepted as part of the universities’ mission of serving society and national security in a period of perceived national emergency.
Higher education emerged from the Second World War as a participant in a military-industrial-educational complex with which universities became increasingly uncomfortable during the Cold War, absent a pressing emergency to justify the intrusions. ROTC was growing even as its academic quality was questioned. University research, including that funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, was increasingly concerned with national security. University research centers and scholars were increasingly playing advisory roles to the security establishment. With the unpopularity of the emerging war in Vietnam, the military became a foil on many campuses, with ROTC programs becoming targets of increasingly violent attacks at the Ivy League and other universities. For example, in May 1970, demonstrators burned the ROTC building at Kent State. The hoses of firefighters who responded were cut, and National Guard members on campus were stoned. The Guardsmen fired on the students, shooting thirteen of them, killing four. Although ROTC continued to be supported by a majority of academic stakeholders, over eighty programs were discontinued by the services. In addition, classified research programs ended, and military history and security studies programs were devalued. In our discipline, a generation of doctoral students who were studying the military was advised to seek other specialties and the professors who taught them were regarded as tainted. Morris Janowitz was hanged in effigy on the University of Chicago campus. Charles Moskos’ office at Northwestern University was stormed by radical students. There was a sit-in outside my office at the University of Michigan.
These changes, according to the authors, had implications for the civic and liberal education of non-military students, as well as for the flow of citizen-soldier officers commissioned through ROTC into the armed forces. If knowledge about the military is an important component of citizenship—because when America’s sons and daughters are sent to war it is on behalf of our citizens—a decrease in military presence on civilian campuses impacts negatively on the ability of the ascending generation of American citizens to debate such wars effectively. Exposure on campus to national security affairs and personnel is for many civilians in America’s middle class their only such exposure.
As the twenty-first century dawned, there was a move to restore ROTC to campuses, particularly the Ivy League schools, and it was an academically more legitimate part of the curriculum, in part because of the protests of the 1970s. At many schools, including Columbia, reintegration was delayed by the discrimination against gay students represented by the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy enacted by the Congress in 1993. That restriction has now been lifted.
Downs and Murtazashvili conclude that with the current return of ROTC to elite campuses, the civic education of both cadets and non-military students has benefited. However, there are other indicators that civic education is not optimal on America’s campuses. The teaching of military history has declined, particularly on elite campuses, and the presence of more general security studies programs seems tenuous. The authors note that as has been the case since the 1950s, only one graduate sociology program has been noted for strength in military sociology. However, the number of PhDs with expertise in this area has increased, as has the number of articles published in major sociology journals that deal with the military.
Perhaps a more pressing question is whether civic education is still an important part of the mission of America’s universities. As athletic revenues seem increasingly to trump academics, entrepreneurship to trump scholarship, and technical innovation to trump general education, it is not clear that the values that dominated American higher education from colonial days through the mid-twentieth century still hold.