The presence of ROTC at Penn is defended on the grounds that ROTC provides scholarships to Penn students and funnels the tuition fees it receives into the University. In exchange, Penn gives ROTC free rent and utilities, besides helping to pay the secretarial staff. ROTC instructors are paid by the military.

ROTC courses are given under the Department of Military Science and they are open to students who are not enrolled in ROTC.

Cornell

Cornell, because of a law requiring land-grant colleges to have military science programs, has had ROTC at its five undergraduate colleges since the training program began during World War I.

The only way that Cornell could abolish all ROTC programs from campus is to forfeit its land grant status and thereby lose the major source of its funds for operation.

When Cornell first established ROTC over 50 years ago, the program was mandatory for all first and second year students in all of Cornell's six undergraduate colleges.

Compulsory ROTC remained at Cornell until 1956, when the faculty voted to make its status voluntary.

ROTC was not an issue again at Cornell until 1968. In the face of adverse reaction to Vietnam and a growing feeling that the University itself was too deeply involved in United States military efforts, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Cornell voted to discontinue all credited ROTC courses in that college. But credited ROTC courses remained at the other five undergraduate colleges at Cornell and ROTC cadets were still admitted to the College of Arts and Sciences.

The decision of the Arts and Sciences faculty came about with little student pressure.

A test case in 1971 brought a non-credit ROTC course back to Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. This fall, however, Arts and Sciences students are receiving four hours of credit for the course. There was no student opposition to the change.

L. Pearce Williams, chairman of the History Department and instructor of the ROTC course, estimated that about 200 Cornell students are ROTC cadets, and that about 25 of them are in the Arts and Sciences college.

Columbia

Columbia set up a Naval ROTC program in 1946, inspired by the recommendation of its president, left-over fervor from World War II, and satisfaction with a wartime on-campus midshipman training program and arrangements for the Navy to use Columbia facilities during the war.

ROTC was never compulsory and never very big at Columbia, and in the 1960s it tapered off even more. It was a minor issue in the agitation that led up to Columbia's great 1968 strike, in which student opposition to alleged Columbia encroachment on the Morningside Heights community was far more vocal and influential. Nevertheless, after the bloody end of the strike, in which police clubbed, beat and arrested the students occupying Hamilton Hall, the Columbia Faculty set up a committee to study ROTC.

In March of 1969 Columbia's Trustees accepted the committee's recommendation that ROTC be made extracurricular--and thus eliminated, since Congress hasn't authorized extracurricular ROTC programs--so that the university could more faithfully carry out its role as "a free center of inquiry." The 45 students already enrolled in ROTC finished their courses and graduated under the old requirements, but no new students were enrolled, and ROTC quickly passed out of sight and almost out of memory.