Obama And McCain V. Ivy League

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Wall Street Journal
September 13, 2008
Pg. 12


On their 9/11 day of campaign truce, Barack Obama and John McCain went to Columbia University and talked earnestly about public service. The Presidential candidates managed to perform a service as well, by calling out their host to welcome the Reserve Office Training Corps back on the Morningside Heights campus.
The suggestion was met with boos from the audience when offered by the Republican hopeful and retired Naval officer, and silence when crowd favorite Mr. Obama (Columbia '83) called the ban "a mistake." The contempt for military service, alas, runs deep at our so-called elite academic institutions.
Five of the eight Ivy League schools kicked out ROTC in the wake of the Vietnam War. Today only Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania allow America's future military leaders to get their instruction on campus. In 2005, Columbia's university senate shot down a resolution to re-establish ROTC. Two years before, the student body voted for readmission by 2-1.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger, who led the fight against ROTC in 2005, says the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy constitutes "improper discrimination and humiliation" of homosexuals. Of course, that didn't stop him last year from inviting on campus Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose regime executes homosexuals for being homosexual. The young men and women at Columbia who want to choose service in the armed forces can hardly be faulted for feeling "improper discrimination and humiliation" on their campus. We'll now see if a bipartisan rebuke on ROTC is enough to shame Columbia and the other Ivies into changing their dishonorable act.
 
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