I am truly proud of my second Alma Mater as Harvard President Drew Faust today signed an agreement with Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus returning the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps program to the campus for the first time in nearly 40 years. While this is significant in itself, I have to say I am most proud of the way in which Harvard handled this transition with decorum and patriotism. 

While other Ivy League campuses, like Columbia, have seen outrageous and embarrassing incidents as they haggle over the idea of returning ROTC to their campuses due to the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", (see this story from the NY Post:http://nyp.st/fLizAE) Harvard kept its promise without major drama and while maintaining the patrician image of the nations oldest university.  I admit I had my doubts about how it would be handled from my own experience as a student in 2006-2007. While the graduate schools are supporters of the military the college had a much more vocal resistance. You could always count on kids from the college picketing a visiting general or military themed event so the question of welcoming the military back to campus seemed in doubt.

But by all accounts President Faust led this effort directly and viewed it as a simple matter of promises made and promises kept.  Harvard has said officially for over a decade that until DADT is repealed they would not support ROTC and upon its shelving the campus would re-open to the U.S. military.  She announced in December she was happy to speak with the military and the Navy immediately stepped up to do so.  It is the perfect first organization as Harvard was one of the first universities in the nation to join Navy ROTC back in 1926. Midshipmen will still attend their ROTC classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ROTC battalion but they are now welcome on campus to wear their uniforms, use offices, classes and athletic fields and a reserve officer professor has been tasked to oversee the program implementation. 

Will there be a rush of students wanting to join ROTC?  Probably not. But no longer will the stain of resistance to military service blacken our nations premier institution of higher learning.  A place that teaches students from freshman to graduate student that service is a higher calling, for 40 years has had to caveat those values with the exclusion of the military. Today, that is no longer the case and as a veteran of four combat tours, over 22 years of military service and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, I am thrilled to no longer have to caveat my attendance at the school either.

For more on this announcement read the Harvard Gazette article published last night: http://bit.ly/ibfOfB