Rotc

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The Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program dates to the National Defense Act of 1916. ROTC built upon existing requirements at land-grant schools (colleges built on public lands that taught agriculture, mechanical arts, and military science) to offer military instruction. Before 1916 this instruction had been applied only haphazardly, often amounting to little more than drill instruction by local Civil War veterans. The 1916 act regularized standards for training and, as part of a more general preparedness movement for World War I, added most of the nation's prestigious colleges and universities. Until World War II, the program largely served to produce officers for the reserves, as its name implies.

In the 1940s and 1950s ROTC became a primary source for accessing large numbers of men into the officer corps of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. ROTC offered men a chance to fulfill their military service as an officer. By the early 1960s, the program faced a significant problem as large numbers of baby boomers began to enter college. Most colleges with ROTC programs required male students to complete two years of military training, but the military did not want to spend the money to train all of them. Accordingly, the military asked colleges and universities to abandon the required two-year portion of ROTC. Most did so reluctantly as administrators saw in ROTC a model citizenship program.

The Vietnam period produced ROTC's greatest period of crisis. Many radical student groups targeted ROTC units as the most visible manifestations of the military presence on campus. However, many administrators and even many student groups supported ROTC because of its traditional role of producing officers believed to be closer in values to the general American population than their service academy counterparts. Despite protests and occasional violence, ROTC survived the Vietnam turmoil almost everywhere outside the Ivy League and small liberal arts colleges, although its curriculum became less technical. Strictly military courses like drill were often replaced with courses in the general college and university program such as foreign area studies.

The end of the draft removed the primary impulse that led men to join ROTC. The attendant decline in enrollments forced significant changes. As early as 1969 the program began to admit women, predating the arrival of women at the service academies by seven years. ROTC also became the principal means of entry into the officer corps for African Americans and Hispanics. The military replaced the prestigious liberal arts and Ivy League schools with branch campuses and mid-sized state universities in the South and the Midwest, most of which had students eager to join ROTC in order to receive the financial benefits. Thus ROTC helped thousands of lower-middle-class and working-class men and women join the military, a process scholars have called the "bluing" of the officer corps. ROTC remains the commissioning source for the majority of American officers. In the past decade, ROTC graduates have become more visible at senior levels, most notably in the persons of two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell from the Army and General Richard Meyers from the Air Force.

Equal Rights Amendment and Drafting Women; Military Families; Powell, Colin; Race and Military; Selective Service; Volunteer Army and Professionalism; Who Served in Vietnam?

Coumbe, Arthur, and Harford, Lee. U. S. Army Cadet Command: The Ten-Year History. Fort Monroe, VA: U.S. Army Cadet Command, 1996.

Karsten, Peter. "Anti-ROTC: Response to Vietnam or 'Consciousness III'?" in New Civil-Military Relations: The Agonies of Adjustment to Post-Vietnam Realities, edited by John Lovell and Philip Kronenberg. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974.

Lyons, Gene, and Masland, John. Education and Military Leadership: A Study of the ROTC. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959.

Neiberg, Michael S. Making Citizen-Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

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