BOSTON – Yale may become the third Ivy League college this year to restore the military’s Reserve Officers Training Corps after spurning the program during the Vietnam War.

Harvard, the oldest U.S. college, said last month that it will reinstate a Navy ROTC program, and Columbia said April 22 that it will “re-engage” with the military in a similar arrangement. Yale faculty will vote May 5 on a committee’s recommendation that the school again recognize ROTC.

The colleges are reaching out to the military after Congress voted in December to repeal the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prohibiting open homosexuality. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, also helped raise awareness of the contributions and sacrifices made by service members, said Graham Allison, formerly an adviser to the Defense secretary in the Clinton administration.

“If you ask most people today whether they’re grateful for the ways in which the U.S. military is enhancing their security, they’d say yes,” said Allison, who is now director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs in a telephone interview. “The military is popular.”

Penn, Cornell and Princeton kept their ROTC programs on campus through the war.

As protests intensified against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the faculty at Yale, in New Haven, Conn., decided in 1969 and 1970 to take away academic credit for ROTC courses and strip the program’s teachers of their faculty titles. Yale also pulled funding for administering ROTC on campus. Since then, Yale students have performed officer training at the University of Connecticut in Storrs or the University of New Haven.

 

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