Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 04:00:16 -0500 From: mike castleman To: rotc-taskforce@columbia.edu Cc: "Nathan C. Walker" , Jeff Williams , Nathan Martin Treadwell , Thomas M Mathewson Subject: Follow-up from TC ROTC debate X-Editor: GNU nano 1.2.4 X-Public-Key: 0x7e407af9 http://mlcastle.net/pubkey.asc User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040907i -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 To the Task Force: As you may be aware, there was a debate held on Friday at Teachers College regarding the proposal to bring ROTC to Columbia and what action the TC Student Senate ought to take in this regard. Though I have already written the Task Force at length, I hope you will permit me a few more moments of your time in order to present some new information which I found useful for Friday's debate, and which Nate Walker has asked me to forward on to you. There is a persistent claim from advocates of ROTC that the ROTC coursework may be of interest to students not taking part in the ROTC program, and a suggestion that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy might be partially overcome by permitting gay, lesbian, and bisexual students to participate ROTC courses. ROTC advocates often claim that the courses might deal with military history, or other topics of general interest. A quick review of the ROTC course catalogs at Fordham[1], MIT[2], and Princeton[3] reveals that this is not the case. Instead, the courses deal almost exclusively with how best to function as an officer in the US Military. This is of course in keeping with ROTC's purpose, but hardly likely to be of interest to non-ROTC students. A related, oft-repeated claim is that military experience is widely valued by civilian employers. Anecdotally, in my own field of Computer Science, this is generally untrue, as most military systems are programmed in a language called Ada, which is perhaps most famous for making programmers forced to use it quake in fear and disgust. Five years of experience in practically anything else would be preferred by most employers to five years of experience in Ada. More systematic research[4] shows that, on average, veterans make less money than their non-veteran peers, when other variables are controlled for. (The paper shows that this effect is much stronger for white veterans than for nonwhite, and does not include any information specifically isolating the case of individuals with college degrees, but the point still stands.) While of course I would not suggest that money is the most important thing, and I certainly agree that people ought to be free to pursue less-profitable careers if they hold them to be otherwise generally worthwhile, the study causes serious doubt to the ROTC Advocates' claim that military experience is generically useful. I assume that the committee has already looked at the texts of Columbia's non-discrimination policy[5] and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law[6]; if not, they make for an interesting study in contrasts. The MIT ROTC Task Force, evaluating whether their attempts to bring that school's ROTC program into compliance with its non-discrimination policy, wrote in 1996: "[T]he Task Force is unanimous on the question of adequacy: there has not been adequate progress toward the elimination of the DOD policy on sexual orientation[7]." It seems unlikely that Columbia would have any better success. And, briefly, an update on something I touched upon in my previous letter. Since I last wrote, Camilo Mejia was released from prison[8] after serving nine months for "desertion" after the military declined to recognize his plea for "conscientious objector" status. I thank the committee, as always, for its hard work on this issue, and look forward to seeing the forthcoming report. Sincerely, Michael Castleman SEAS '03 mailto:mlc67@columbia.edu tel:+1-(646)-382-7220 [1] http://nycrotc.com/new2005/home/coursecat.html [2] http://web.mit.edu/armyrotc/classes.html [3] http://www.princeton.edu/~armyrotc/courses.htm [4] Angrist, Joshua D., "Using Social Security Data on Military Applicants to Estimate the Effect of Voluntary Military Service on Earnings." National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #5192, July 1995. Online at http://ssrn.com/abstract=225255 free to holders of Columbia email addresses. [5] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/vpaa/eoaa/docs/nondispol.html [6] Public Law 103-160, available online at http://dont.stanford.edu/regulations/pl103-60.pdf [7] http://web.mit.edu/committees/rotc/final2.html [8] http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/164223 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFCLBgfrbXc6n5AevkRAuS4AJ9BbRjHfxnv5jx9KfUVj4e9l/EEKgCgpBL4 swj1pwCp3qhyNQP9Z8JqWUc= =q53G -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----