Now it’s “Don’t Fight, Don’t Resist”

Now that “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been repealed, many elite universities are rethinking their opposition to allowing the military’s ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) back on campus given that the argument that the program is inherently discriminatory no longer applies.

However, Colman McCarthy, a Founder and Director of the Center for Teaching Peace, an organization that does not operate in a world dominated by Nazi fascists, believes otherwise, writing that:

“…schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of ‘don't ask, don't tell.’ They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.”

Presumably one of those “reasons of conscience” would be the willingness to allow the enslavement of human beings to continue in the southern half of the country while the north rejected military solutions to the conflict and instead examined the “complex role of culture in peacebuilding and conflict resolution” and the “historically grounded conceptualizations of culture, core patterns of cultural differences in values and beliefs, interpretive frames, and specific conflict intervention approaches in terms of their cross-cultural applicability.”

That probably would have worked (although it would have left Ken Burns making documentaries on Fussball and Jarts).

Besides, McCarthy finds ROTC coursework to be “laughably weak” in contrast to the rigor found in his favored fields of academic study such as “peace studies, women's studies, black studies, and gay and lesbian studies,” the graduates of which ensure that the nation will always have a steady supply of desperately needed waiters.

It should also be pointed out that McCarthy is not “anti-soldier” in the least. Rather, he points out:

“I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles.”

Whether those principles are to, say, individual freedoms and liberty or to a policy of “don’t tell, don’t get stoned to death.”

(It has something to do with interpretive frames and cross-cultural applicability.)

All McCarthy is trying to say (that ability to speak freely being the product of a country that decided to challenge totalitarian communism with something other than historically grounded conceptualizations of culture), is that the elite schools must:

“…rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace.”

The luxury of that position being provided by the 300-plus non-elite schools that choose otherwise.

J.