ROTC and the Future of Liberal Education
First, before I forget it, how great is it that the president of Harvard is named Faust?? That’s a goldmine for newspaper headlines as far as I’m concerned.? “Budget Cuts Call for Faustian Bargains.”? “Has Harvard Sold its Soul?”? One could go on all day.? I suppose the only danger is that folks might overuse it.
That aside, one of my favorite students at UGA was an ROTC student in my Plato and Boethius class, and I do think that the other students in that class benefitted greatly from his contributions.? And, as I found out recently when the same student came back to Park Hall to interview me for a sociology project (I’m interesting research material, it turns out), he’s also taken the rudimentary political and psychological philosophy that we explored in that class and brought it to bear on relevant questions in his military science classes and on his business and sociology classes.? In other words, I have at least one student who has benefitted from and who has given benefit to interaction with a university class.
Some of my readers (at least two of you three) will know that I hold to nonviolence as a normative ethics for Christians.? (Out in public I call myself a pacifist for the same reason I call myself a Christian–it’s pretentious and takes too long to pronounce labels-that-are-actually-treatises.)? But that says nothing about the existence of or the moral goodness of military personnel.? Some folks (most of them self-proclaimed C.S. Lewis fans) will make the too-easy identification of all “pacifists,” neglecting that there are at least twenty-five discrete varieties of Christian nonviolence.? (John Howard Yoder wrote this book exploring that variety.)
So as a Christian pacifist who acknowledges the role of the sword in a history governed by Providence (and who finds secular pacifism almost unintelligible), I have regarded ROTC at UGA as a neighbor, and I’m glad that I’ve had my officers in class.? I’ll end this little reflection with some words from the article’s author on the educational benefits for civilian college students of proximity to actual military officers:
Power and the legitimate use of violence (or the plausible threat of it) are sometimes necessary to protect security and justice in a hostile world. But power and violence are subject to abuse, and they seem to contradict liberal democracies’ commitment to the Enlightenment belief in peace and reason. Some police officers and soldiers have trouble reconciling the use of violence with conventional morality, and thereby forsake their respective duties by falling into a state of cognitive and moral dissonance. Thinking about the use and misuse of violence in war can help students resolve and appreciate those tensions, making them more aware of what Max Weber described as the “ethic of responsibility,” which calls for accepting the duty to act in the face of a tragic world replete with moral tensions and uncertain consequences. In other words, inquiries into war can help to make students more realistic, as well as more intellectually and morally mature.
Now here’s the Rorshach test moment: when you read that, were you thinking of anti-war protestors in their no-consequences “free speech zones,” or were you thinking of first-term-Bush-era College Republicans and their no-consequences student publications??? Whichever one you were thinking of, someone else reading this blog was thinking of the other one.
And that’s the point.
