Nearly 40 years after anti-war protests and other complaints forced ROTC programs off the Stanford campus, the military training program could be on its way back.
A faculty committee will study the possibility of inviting the Reserve Officer Training Corps back to campus, said Andrea Goldsmith, an electrical engineering professor who chairs the Faculty Senate.
"One possibility is for Stanford to re-establish a ROTC program on the Stanford campus, but there are many other possibilities as well," she said last week at a senate meeting.
The 11 Stanford students now enrolled in ROTC now must attend their classes at other universities: UC Berkeley for Navy and Marine ROTC; San Jose State University for the Air Force; and Santa Clara University for the Army.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, both faculty members, are pushing to bring the military training programs back to Stanford.
Unless universities like Stanford help provide the country with military officers, "We are in danger of seriously compromising a 200-year-old tradition in this society of the citizen soldier," Kennedy said during the presentation at Thursday's Faculty Senate meeting.
