My alarm goes off at 5:25 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. I don't have classes on Wednesdays, and, unless my housemates are having a fire drill, there is absolutely no reason why I, your average second semester College senior, should be up this early. I jump out of bed, dress and head downstairs.
I am not three bites into breakfast when my roommate Charlie, known officially as Midshipman Charles Durkin, a College senior, appears in his Naval sweats. We're late. We fly out the door and on to Franklin Field, which is still dark before sunrise.
For the Penn students enrolled in Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, this is life two to three mornings each week. By the time you're just getting up for your nine o'clock poetry class and hoofing it down to Bennett, Penn's NROTC unit has already been at work in the Hollenback Center for hours, with physical training starting at 6 a.m., and classes held from 7:30 to 9 a.m.
At Penn, NROTC is headquartered at Hollenbeck, past 33rd on Spruce Street -- far from the center of campus by any measure. At neighboring institutions, like Villanova University, this is hardly the case; buildings are clustered at the center of campus, students in khaki uniforms are seen at almost all parts of the school.
According to Tom Bispham, a College freshman in the NROTC Marine program, ROTC at Villanova is "much more a part of the university. The building itself is located in the center of the main campus and it's a perfect location for people to go hang out between classes.
"We're encouraged to do that here, but it's so far away from our campus that it's like a class itself just to walk down there."
When in uniform on Wednesdays, Naval and Marine officers make quite a visual impression striding down the walk or in a lecture hall.
Charlie agrees that being a NROTC kid at Penn can be frustrating due to some of the physical and bureaucratic divisions between the University and the program. He says that his group's location on campus has "always been an underlying complaint. It makes us think we have to work that much harder to be recognized."
It's a sentiment he says that many of his fellow officers share: "That's the general feeling among the ROTC kids. Our courses don't count for credit, so it makes things that much harder."
But any complaints students may have are not seconded by the University or ROTC leaders. Col. John Clauer, the head of both Villanova's and Penn's NROTC units, says that Penn and ROTC have a great relationship. He said that every school is different and every unit is different, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Clauer and his counterpart in the Office of the Vice Provost of University Life, Terry Conn, both expressed satisfaction with the open and positive relationship shared by the two institutions. At Penn, NROTC is just one more activity, not an integrated part of the curriculum.
But Penn students in ROTC might be interested to know that Penn's relationship to their ROTC corps, good or bad, wasn't always this way. ROTC's seemingly marginalized position on Penn's campus is, in actuality, a rather recent phenomenon.
*
The Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps offers undergraduates the chance to attend college on full scholarship in exchange for four years of Naval service when they graduate. Students interested in the program apply to the national scholarship and then apply separately for admission into any one of a number of host colleges or universities. If one wins the scholarship and also gains admission to college, the student goes off to school like any average freshman, focusing on academic requirements, athletic teams, theater groups, whatever.
In addition, however, they must also take numerous classes in Naval Science in conjunction with physical training and military drills, most of which take place between the hours of 6 and 9 a.m. To champions of ROTC, this gives students the benefits of receiving a mainstream college education while at the same time getting practical military training for their future careers as Naval Reserve officers -- ready to lead in combat should they be called to duty. After their duty is up, they have marketable skills and a killer resume. And you can bounce a quarter off their beds.
Penn's NROTC unit was founded in 1940 and flourished during the patriotic mid-20th century. During the war years, college-aged men and women all over the country enthusiastically volunteered for military service, and, after the war, the G.I. Bill made college dreams a reality for millions of people. Young people at the time felt pretty good about Uncle Sam.
But by the late 1960s, all that had drastically changed. Young Americans had become highly suspicious of governmental institutions and led protests and riots to close ROTC units on campuses all across America. A U.S. News and World Report article dated Sept. 24, 1973 reports that national enrollment in ROTC programs had dropped from 212,416 in the1968-69 academic year to just 75,024 in 1972-73. Furthermore, many prominent schools like New York University, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale and Stanford began denying academic credit for the required ROTC classes in the military sciences.
Meanwhile, ROTC's presence on Penn's campus caused no less controversy. In 1968, the height of the tumult of the 1960s, Penn's ROTC unit was moved from 3905 Spruce Street to the Hollenback Center -- just past Franklin Field, halfway over the South Street bridge. Apparently the location change was not far enough for some, and in February of 1971, 35 Penn students held a sit-in at Hollenback in protest of an ROTC unit being on campus at all.
A 1969 Wharton School report by the "Committee to Study the Academic Status" of the Army and Navy ROTC units on Penn's campus said that ROTC simply did not fit with Penn's ideal of higher education. It concluded: "ROTC programs violate the goals of many individuals and groups who are attempting to make the university a place where knowledge is used for constructive ends. Thus, the continuing presence of ROTC units on a campus can constitute a disruptive factor inimical to both university and community goals."
By 1972, anti-military pressures led the College of Arts and Sciences finally to stop giving credit for Naval Science courses, thus establishing a permanent ideological divide.
*
Flash forward, to when the debate over ROTC flared up again. This time, however, the ideological differences stemmed from conflicting policies over discrimination. In May of 1990, the University Council -- a group of administrators, faculty, students and staff that make policy recommendations to the University President -- found that because of the military's ban on homosexual men and women, ROTC was in direct violation of Penn's non-discrimination policy. The Council hoped to use the University's clout as a bargaining chip in order to protest and ultimately change the military's stance. As a result, the council advised then-President Sheldon Hackney to phase out the program by 1993 if the military's stance on homosexuality did not change.
By 1992, however, Hackney had not yet moved to close the ROTC unit, vowing instead to wait and see the outcome of the "don't ask, don't tell" debates in Washington. One of former-President Bill Clinton's first moves in office was to challenge the military's ban on homosexuals, but the resulting "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" conclusion left many scratching their heads. From the University's standpoint, nothing had been solved, and in the Fall of 1993 yet another committee was set up to explore the issue.
To complicate things, universities like Penn receive a great deal of research dollars from the Department of Defense for technological research. The department had said that it would cut funding to any institution that closed an ROTC unit. The University Council then suggested that an "arm's length" relationship between the University and ROTC might solve the policy conflicts, while allowing the program to remain in place. This policy would both sever all financial ties with the University and end the practice of granting academic credit for the remaining handful of accredited Wharton, Engineering and Nursing courses.
But the University Council's recommendation never came to fruition. Instead, in 1995, then-Provost Stan Chodorow issued a statement saying that the University would give financial support to any homosexual man or women who lost a military scholarship as a result of military policy -- but that was more or less the end of the debate. By April of 1996, the University vowed that it would not make changes to ROTC. The four undergraduate schools signed new charters with the unit, and all was put to rest. The University still provides both direct and indirect support to the program in the way of staff, office supplies and office space.
*
Now, it seems, ROTC, may be in vogue again. Sept. 11 happened, and patriotism is in again. The students walking down the street in their khaki uniforms now receive looks of admiration, not confusion.
"We've seen a spike in patriotism," said Lt. Bart Marsh, the advisor to juniors and seniors in the ROTC program. People will honk at us while we're walking down the street near campus and say 'thank you' while we're in uniform."
Charlie has also noticed a changing attitude: "People have started looking to the military. They look to us to see what's going on, as if we have some inside information or something. People are generally positive."
There's still the nagging issue of conflicting discrimination policies lingering somewhere in the background. According to ROTC officials, there is no more a conflict here than with any of the other groups on Penn's campus. Marsh remarked that "if we really looked at it and looked at all the clubs, you can find exclusionary clauses in almost every club."
And anyway, there is a difference between the institution and the people who make it up.
"You're not dealing with an anti-homosexual body of people," Bispham commented. "These kids are the same kids who go to school with you -- these are the same kids who got accepted to the same school, who in a lot of ways feel the same way that everyone else does in the student body. It's a pretty open minded group of kids. It's the institutions that set these regulations"
