Aiming for ROTC
Harvard Professor Harry Lewis recounts the controversy over the school gym, which has instituted women-only hours, and gives a brief history of Harvard’s policies on discrimination.
Harvard’s nondiscrimination policies now cover “race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age,” and a few other things, and the same absolutism applies to all categories. Harvard has no ethnic or single-sex housing. Women’s groups have to allow male members. The Black Students’ Association can’t close white students out of its meetings.
Harvard justifies its gender segregation of the gym as a courtesy to Muslims. So how does Harvard apply its policy to ROTC?
Harvard bans ROTC because the military violates the “sexual orientation” part of Harvard’s nondiscrimination policy. Harvard students can participate in ROTC at MIT, but Harvard will not provide them meeting space or any other support - even bus fare down Massachusetts Avenue. . . .
Is the gym exception merely a reasonable kindness to conservative Muslim women? Then Harvard’s failure of courtesy to its cadets suggests that politics determine what forms of discrimination are inoffensive.
Lewis understates his case. Harvard and many other schools bear an animosity toward the military that reached full flower in the Vietnam era. ROTC programs were banished before homosexuality became the driving issue, and there can be little doubt that these schools would find other reasons to disallow ROTC programs even if the homosexuality issue were resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
