In essence, the committee supported the views of the anti-ROTC students. It found little evidence of open indoctrination in ROTC courses, but charged that the ROTC curriculum "does not allow truly free and open enquiry into controversial problems related to the role of the U.S. in world affairs or to the Communist movement." The committee recommended that ROTC instruction be separated from the CLA curriculum and that no academic credit be granted for ROTC courses. These recommendations were adopted almost unanimously by both the CLA and University faculties, and have now been sent to the administration for the final decision.

The controversy at B.U. has demonstrated the growing uneasiness of the university-military alliance on which ROTC is based. Although the first move to "dis-credit" ROTC came from a small group of radical students, later faculty response in favor of changing the status of ROTC was overwhelming. The students and the faculty may have emphasized different aspects of the ROTC issue, but the underlying idea that military training is not a proper function of a university now seems to have won widespread acceptance at B.U.

Although a large-scale move by American colleges to abolish ROTC is extremely unlikely, it is possible that many colleges will adopt a policy of dissociation similar to the one approved by the B.U. faculty this winter. This possibility arises partly from the increased sensitivity to the military presence on the campuses since the beginning of the Vietnam war. But that is not the most important factor, and even without the war it is quite conceivable that many colleges would soon be trying to reduce the official status enjoyed by ROTC on their campuses.

The basic fact behind the growing opposition to ROTC is the increasingly inescapable realization that ROTC now wants to recruit college students for mainly military careers. The implication of this is that the presence of ROTC can no longer be justified by the old arguments about the need to maintain a civilian army. As the emphasis of ROTC shifts from training reserves to recruiting career officers, the view that ROTC "civilianizes" the military--the rationale by which educators have long justified their uneasy relationship with the armed services--becomes untenable.

ROTC is becoming, therefore, a recruiting agency similar to that of any large corporation. As such, many educators feel that it should no longer have its special status on the campus to aid its recruiting of college students. Even if ROTC programs lose this status, however, the result would not be an elitist officer corps, as opponents of "dis-crediting" ROTC often charge. Today's army requires highly educated college graduates. The military academies alone cannot provide them. The nation no longer needs special ROTC programs to "civilianize" the military, if only because many of today's career officers are technicians in uniform.

For these reasons, it is possible that many of the nation's colleges and universities will soon tend to change their relationships with the military by abolishing academic credit for ROTC courses and by generally withdrawing official university sanction from ROTC activities. Certain aspects of ROTC's position on the campuses are now specified by law (e.g., the full professorships for the militarily-appointed commanders of ROTC units), but these requirements could likely be lifted under pressure from the colleges. The armed forces need the skilled manpower provided by the colleges more than the colleges need ROTC money.

Of course, even though our educational institutions can curb ROTC, they will not necessarily do so. Many universities are more than satisfied with the present arrangements. More than 100 institutions continue to maintain compulsory ROTC in the freshman and sophomore years, despite actual discouragement from the Pentagon, which views compulsory programs as inefficient. The B.U. faculty's uneasiness about the relationship between the education and the military is evidently not shared by many American educators.

If the Reserve Officer Training Corps does succeed in retaining its special status within American higher education, it will be largely because the nation's most prestigious universities continue to support that special status. The ROTC units at most of the country's best liberal arts colleges are little more than tokens. Harvard's Army ROTC unit, for example, failed last year to produce even the minimum number of commissions normally required to remain in existence. The requirement, of course, was waived, because the prestige derived from a long-established unit at Harvard is at least as valuable to the Army as the small number of short-term officers which that unit produces. The services, in short, are more sensitive to the significance of ROTC at such schools as Harvard and Yale than the schools themselves appear to be.

Today's ROTC is a complex and changing institution. It still uses the purposes for which it was founded 50 years ago to justify its status in American education, but the modern ROTC little resembles its ancestor of 1916. Thus, it is likely that American colleges will continue to re-examine their relationship with ROTC