Editor,
Regarding Wednesday’s piece on ROTC recruitment on campus, I feel that the article greatly overlooked the more specific reason behind the protest of ROTC recruitment and that the piece quickly turned in to a 360 word advertisement for the ROTC program.
Therefore it seems necessary to put the counter argument forward here. The article seems to suggest that the protesters were simply against U.S. militarism or anti-military, and while surely some of them were, one of reasons the protesters had for singling out ROTC recruitment is the unprecedented amount of access the ROTC gets to students. One of the criticisms put forward by the main organizer of the protest was that the ROTC received its own day during the welcome back days for recruitment and that this day was billed “Safety, Health, Wellness, and ROTC day.”
While what benefits or harm ROTC brings to UNM could be disputed, the critique that ROTC maintains a large and overbearing presence at UNM and on many other college campuses has a great deal of validity. In fact some may be surprised to learn that having ROTC on campus is enforced by law. The Solomon Amendment, first passed in 1995, states that any “institutions of higher education that prevent ROTC access or military recruiting on campus” can be denied federal funding. This seems like a stark example of how ROTC is given an undeniably outsized amount of access to students.
Thus it seems that the protest of the ROTC recruitment day and the law-enforced presence of ROTC may have been picking on a more specific issue than the broader anti-war and that its critique is well founded.
Will Thomson
UNM student
