From Draft NOtices, January—March 2011
—Rick Jahnkow
As sources of public money for public education shrink, K-12 school districts are being forced to consider budget cuts that will seriously affect classes and student services. In some places they are reducing or eliminating counselors, school nurses, teacher aides, librarians, and programs like art, music and athletics.
One program that is rarely subjected to cuts is the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), a military training/recruiting program that is currently offered in approximately 4,000 of the nation’s high schools. Even though this course is a non-academic elective that does not count toward meeting admission requirements at state colleges and universities — and schools are scrambling to provide electives that do help students meet those requirements — JROTC is usually given privileged treatment by school trustees who are politically intimidated by the pro-JROTC lobby and often deceived about the money that could be saved by cutting the program.
There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about the presence of a military-run program in public schools -- for example, the propagandistic character of the curriculum, the questionable credentials of the instructors, and the fact that JROTC brings marksmanship training into most of the schools where it exists. Public debate over these concerns, however, has never led school trustees to remove a JROTC unit. In large part, this is because of the well-organized lobby that emerges from JROTC classes themselves. There is considerable politicking by instructors, and the military structure of the program allows them to easily mobilize cadets and their families.
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
From Draft NOtices, July—September 2010
Protests, arrests, vigils, boycotts, and message force Army to retreat.
—Pat Elder
A coalition of about 30 peace groups has proven triumphant in its goal of shutting down the Army Experience Center (AEC) in a suburban shopping mall in Philadelphia. The Army announced on June 10 that it will close down the recruitment center on July 31, 2010, four months before its lease expires.
The beleaguered $13 million, 14,500 square foot AEC at Franklin Mills Mall has been the center of controversy since it opened its doors in August of 2008. Its closure is a testament to the steely resolve of a handful of activists from New York to Maryland who were intent on the facility's demise. They organized several protests of hundreds of people that resulted in a dozen arrests, as well as regular vigils and a boycott of mall owner Simon Property Group, Inc.
Witnessing 13-year-old boys giving each other high fives for "blowing away ragheads" while the simulated blood of Afghans poured on their screens provided enough stimulus to turn outrage to action. The U.S. Army was ultimately forced to retreat, bringing to mind the revolutionary words of Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
The AEC boasts dozens of video game computers and X-Box consoles with various interactive, military-style shooting games. The facility has sophisticated Apache helicopter and Humvee simulators that allow teens to simulate battlefield killing. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Rob Watson compared the Army Experience Center to "a heavy dose of candy cigarettes."
From Draft NOtices, July—September 2010
— Sean Dinces
On April 20, representatives from the Naval War College met with students at Brown University to pressure the school’s administration to bring ROTC back to campus. Invited by a new student organization called Brown Students for ROTC, the meeting’s attendees lamented a longstanding policy at Brown and other Ivy League universities that prohibits military science departments on campus, denies credit for military science courses, and requires students who want to participate in ROTC to commute to a nearby university where the program already exists. ROTC units were eliminated throughout the Ivy League during the Vietnam War when faculty, under pressure from students, deemed that institutional support for the military implicated their universities in the violation of international law in Southeast Asia. Since then, sporadic calls for ROTC’s reinstatement have surfaced; but, until now, these appeals have generally been ignored.
This time, things have changed. As reported recently in the Boston Globe (see http://tinyurl.com/ivyleagueROTC), Ivy League administrators have been increasingly receptive to pro-ROTC appeals. Moreover, the most recent efforts are neither isolated nor disorganized. Several pro-ROTC campaigns have recently emerged at other top-tier universities like Harvard and Stanford under the auspices of the umbrella group Advocates for ROTC (http://advocatesforrotc.org/), and are demanding course credit for military science and the eventual restoration of military science departments on campus. Student sentiment is becoming alarmingly sympathetic — not just apathetic — to these demands. A recent poll in Brown’s student newspaper suggested that a “plurality” of the student body favors ROTC’s return (http://tinyurl.com/BrownROTC). This situation deserves attention from counter-recruitment and campus activists, because the rhetorical strategy developed by the pro-ROTC contingent is helping it appeal to students and faculty who identify as liberal or progressive. Below, I outline and rebut the main points of this rhetorical strategy.
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
