ROTC: "ANOMALOUS PRIVILEGES"

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your quotation from my remarks at the Faculty meeting of December third--given by me to a CRIMSON reporter by telephone--was accurate, but so cryptic that I should like to elaborate somewhat. I was quoted as saying that the main issue of the ROTC dispute is "non-University control of curriculum content and Faculty appointments." (CRIMSON, December 4, 1968, page 8.)

The essential issue to me is the independence of the University, that is, it's academic freedom. The two glaring invasions of this independence in the present ROTC set-up are first, that the Congressional act establishing it says that the content of instruction shall be determined by the Secretary to the service in question. Beyond that, the officer in charge of a program shall, though appointed by the Pentagon, be given the rank of professor in the faculty.

The established Faculty patterns in these respects are clear. So far as instructional content is not left entirely to the discretion of the individual instructor, it is determined by Departments or even at some level by the Faculty as a whole, but never by an agency outside the University. For appointment to faculty status, there are regular procedures involving departments and elements of the Administration. Though suggestions from outside are generally welcome, no agency outside the University exercises a right to designate a Faculty appointment.

Generally speaking, determination of instructional content and of Faculty appointments are guided by academic standards. This is to say, value of the content as contribution to the cognitive understanding of the topical subject-matter, and of instructors as competent to convey or enhance such understanding.

To be sure, the University in its professional Faculties goes beyond "pure" academic functions in training practitioners in a variety of professional fields, but still maintains essential control of curriculum and the qualification of Faculty personnel in University hands.

In this whole context, the present ROTC arrangement is anomalous, with special reference to the University's freedom to determine its own curriculum content and to make its own Faculty appointments by its own standards. Since ROTC is mainly located in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I think both that these two invasions of University independence (academic freedom) are out of place, and that such elements of "training" of officers in the armed services as there is, should be abandoned.

The principles involved have a bearing on the issue raised by Professor Putnam, though I did not speak on this in the meeting. The independence of the University, as I understand it, means that, within the limits of moral tolerance, the University is not committed to any one political position, just as the outside society does not impose on it any one doctrinal orthodoxy--though in the past this was the rule. The Putnam motions would, in my opinion, if they prevailed, commit the Faculty to a specific general political position which comes very close to a doctrinal orthodoxy. The rationale for such a position is not generated inside the academic world from academic considerations, but would be imposed upon it from without by a particular politically committed group. To be sure, this group claims moral sanction for its position, but so do other, differing groups claim moral sanction for their own positions.

It seems to me to be an unnecessary and undesirable confusion to identify the objections to the, to me, patently anomalous privileges of outside, non-academic interests through ROTC, with the assertion that these anomalies can only be removed by committing the Faculty to an alternative rigid bond to a set of essentially non-academic political doctrines. This would amount to exchanging one rather limited outside dependence for another much more comprehensive one.

In opposing this, I do not wish for a moment to suggest limiting the rights of individual Faculty members to share the Putnam position. This, however, is very different from committing the Faculty as a whole to it, with the implication that the members who dissented were not cognizant of the moral obligations of a University Faculty. Talcott Parsons   Professor of Sociology