Interesting piece today in the Opinion Journal about Columbia University's refusal to bring ROTC back to campus.
{...}Yet Columbia remains a holdout, not least because of Mr. Bollinger's dismal leadership. It certainly didn't have to be this way. The 1994 Solomon Amendment forbids universities that exclude ROTC from their campuses from receiving Pentagon funding--reason enough, we would think, for a university president to bring his school into compliance with the law. In April 2003, Columbia held a student referendum on ROTC. Two-thirds voted to bring it back. This led the university senate to appoint a 10-member panel to examine the subject; it split down the middle on the question of readmitting ROTC "as soon as is practicable."{...}
See, this is where the Opinon Journal missed a big opportunity to take a big, fat whack at Columbia's politically correct, lefty ponfitications.
ROTC, along with being an armed forces training/recruitment device, is also a huge scholarship program. You see, if you join up with the Reserve Officer's Training Corps, you get money to pay for school, and while you are required to serve for a specified period of time after you graduate, it's no different than the Americorps program, which I don't believe Columbia has an issue with.
Columbia, with its hoity-toity attitude is depriving its students of the potential of financial aid. You know, getting the government to pay for education, which is something I believe is something the lefty professors and adminstrators would advocate. This policy, one could also suppose if one were so inclined, discriminates against those who perhaps don't qualify for a large financial aid package, who haven't received scholarships ad infinitum, and need yet another way to pay for school without taking out a small fortune in student loans.
How much is tuition at Columbia again?
Too bad the Opinion Journal missed that one.
Posted by Kathy at May 11, 2005 01:06 PM