Army ROTC needs more boots on more campuses

By John Renehan
Sunday, July 4, 2010; B01

The military vs. elite universities. It's a long-standing conflict that got some air time last week at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, who, as dean of Harvard Law School, enforced a school policy restricting military recruiters on campus. Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said that Kagan's stance "punished the military and demeaned our soldiers as they were courageously fighting two wars overseas." The nominee was held up as a representative of an out-of-touch academic elite that views the burdens carried by ordinary Americans -- burdens such as military service -- with detachment and even disdain.

I've spent time in both the academic and military worlds. And there is some truth to the "out of touch" critique. But when it comes to the minimal military presence at many universities, the academy has a partner in crime: the U.S. Army itself.

In the past two decades, the Army has shrunk the resources devoted to its Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs -- a primary source of new officers -- at colleges in a number of states and large urban areas. According to public Army documents, the reductions were particularly sharp in the Northeast, which had 50 ROTC programs in 1987. That number is down to 27 today.

These closures were part of post-Cold War drawdowns and budget cutbacks, but the selective pattern of the reductions amounted to a nationwide realignment of ROTC resources.

Army ROTC works with an annual budget of $577 million to serve the entire country, according to the Army Cadet Command, the unit that administers ROTC; it can't be everywhere.

But today Army ROTC programs are concentrated in the South and the Midwest at the expense of more populous and diverse metropolitan areas. As of 2004, according to an analysis of military data from the nonpartisan Population Reference Bureau, those two regions produced 59 percent of new Army officers.

A clear example of this shift is New York City. For the past 19 years, the city of 8 million people has been served by only two Army ROTC programs within its five boroughs, at Fordham University in the Bronx and St. John's University in Queens, which together receive roughly the same resources as the ROTC program at Texas A&M. Though the St. John's and Fordham student populations combined are just under 23,000 to Texas A&M's 38,000, those programs serve what's known as the entire "catchment" area of New York. That is the largest university student population in the country -- 605,000, according to the Census Bureau -- but in 2006, the New York City programs graduated only 34 new Army officers. The Army also offers ROTC programs at Seton Hall and Rutgers universities, in New Jersey, and at Hofstra University, in Long Island, to serve the New York area, but the lengthy commute time makes them unrealistic for many students in the city.

Alabama, with 4.7 million residents, has 10 Army ROTC programs -- the same number it had before the wave of closures began in 1989. Next door, Mississippi, with a population of 2.9 million, has five ROTC programs and has lost only one since '89. Utah and South Dakota both are home to three ROTC programs.

But in more urban areas, the programs have been scaled back. Pittsburgh and Chicago have each seen ROTC programs cut from three to one; New Jersey, from seven to three.

This is not simply a result of a long-perceived hostility to the military in cities or on elite campuses. Apart from several instances of Ivy League schools turning their backs on ROTC, in most cases the military has not been ejected. Some schools that once hosted programs would welcome them back.

The Army Cadet Command indicates that it would like to increase ROTC presence in cities. "Metropolitan areas are a focus of the United States Army Cadet Command," said spokesman Mike Johnson. "Universities in urban areas offer unique diversity that the Army seeks. Cadet Command is reviewing options to expand access and opportunities in metropolitan areas."

Privately, however, officers in charge of recruiting have said that it is cheaper to recruit cadets in places such as Texas and Alabama. The costs of expanding ROTC in places such as New York are excessive, they have said, and universities there have insufficient space or are not very welcoming.

There are nearly 12 million people and dozens of colleges in the New York and Long Island area -- which is also home, incidentally, to one of the nation's two busiest military enlistment facilities. Yet there are only three Army officer training programs. It's not the city that's the problem; ROTC programs thrived for decades in New York before being closed by the Army during the 1980s and '90s. The City University of New York system, for example, 50 years ago commissioned as many new Army officers as any school except West Point.

"This is not about the 'bad Ivies,' " says Steve Trynosky, a reserve officer who once served in the storied 10th Mountain Division, and a former active-duty Army medical professions recruiter. He has talked about this issue at Army conferences and has tussled with Army ROTC's chief demographer. "This is about the military's capricious decision, supported by questionable analysis, that students from these regions -- at state schools as well as the Ivies -- are not as willing to serve in the officer corps, and are not as desirable, as those from 'favored' regions."

Trynosky worked as an Army medical recruiter in New York in 2001 and 2002, and I did a brief stint there myself in 2005, recruiting for officer training programs. I recall attending a career fair as a brand-new lieutenant, standing uselessly next to two recruiter sergeants in camouflage as students and recent graduates, in business suits with their résumés in hand, strode past our "Go Army" table without a word. The recruiters hadn't been trained how to "pitch" to a college student, let alone how to do it in a place like New York, where the uniformed services are practically invisible. So I set out on my own, roaming the hall in my uniform and talking to young New Yorkers one on one about becoming a military officer. Students who had never really considered the military but were drawn to service began to see that it was something they could do.

Soon after that career fair, I had people seeking me out. A kid who was putting himself through Baruch College. A lawyer who wanted to join the JAG Corps but had gotten short shrift at the recruiting station. The son of a state assemblyman. They all wanted to serve, and they all told me that they were surprised to find an Army officer, of a similar educational background, ready to talk to them seriously.

Army recruiters -- and military recruiters in general -- don't have an unlimited budget. They need to make smart decisions about where to spend time and money.

"We are in a resource-constrained environment," Maj. Gen. Montague Winfield, then the ROTC chief, told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. The Army has to choose the most cost-effective recruiting markets.

But we learned in New York that it is not merely a matter of raw resources. After attending more than 75 career fairs at colleges in the area and seeing that regular Army recruiters failed to show up to most of them, Trynosky set up his own officer-recruiting table at a public service career fair at Columbia University. He was deluged. Armed only with homemade flyers and an officer's uniform, in a single day he identified three students who ultimately enlisted for the Army's grueling Officer Candidate School. By contrast, the Army's self-imposed target for officer-training programs in the New York City region is roughly 30 new officers per year.

Trynosky says Army ROTC officials have told him that they've tried and failed to expand in places like New York -- that the Army's resource allocation matches the market. But, having seen the genuine interest from students in the city, it seems to me as though the Army has been influenced by the same dismissive attitude that universities are so often accused of having toward the military. Why are our huge and diverse cities -- especially New York, with a still-gaping wound in the Earth -- allocated paltry recruiting resources? Shouldn't the armed services, which need the best talent from across the country, do more to reach beyond what they see as tried-and-true recruiting grounds?

The Marine Corps, apparently, would answer in the affirmative. According to their recruiters, the Marines aggressively target would-be officers in New York and other major metropolitan areas and get a diverse reward for their efforts. (Says one young recruiter based in the Northeast: "We kill it in the cities!")

True, the military has sometimes been rebuffed at places such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia, all of which banned ROTC from campus during the Vietnam War and continue to bar it because of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. No one likes to be underappreciated. But limiting resources in entire regions isn't the best way to counter a slight, whether real or imagined.

The Army is artificially restricting its outreach. That's no way to attract the best and the brightest to a military that urgently needs them. We are engaged in counterinsurgency fights in two wars, demanding creative leadership, cultural competency and innovative thinking.

Military service is a worthy endeavor for any American, from any walk of life and any part of the country. The Army should recruit its officers accordingly. In this ninth hard year of the Afghan campaign, it can hardly afford not to cast a wide net.

john_renehan@hotmail.com

John Renehan is a lawyer with the Defense Department. He was an artillery officer in the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division from 2005 to 2008 and deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, in 2007-2008. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Defense Department or its components.