What does a military presence bring to the American academy? Does the military even belong on college campuses? And what exactly is the state of security studies in American higher education? In their book, Donald Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili take a threefold approach to answering these questions, and in so doing have produced a work of uncommon breadth and scope that will appeal to audiences in both camps.
Divided into a pedagogical survey of military education within the university, a “field guide” to security studies programs at major American universities, and a detailed account of the complex and evolving relationship between Columbia University and its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, Arms and the University reads very much like three separate (and not entirely equal) works. This unusual organizational scheme presents challenges and opportunities both for the reader and for the reviewer. In the end, however, the book succeeds reasonably well at weaving its disparate strands into a coherent whole. It does so by remaining true to its focus on its core question (p. 5): “What is the appropriate role or presence for the military and military-related studies in American higher education?”
The majority of the book is concerned with answering this question via an examination of the evolution of the ROTC program at Ivy League campuses, looking specifically at Columbia University's relationship with it. The story of the decreasing antipathy of at least some parts of the academy, primarily the Ivy League, toward the military (that is, the ROTC program) was still unfolding as the book was going to press. Naturally, a compelling narrative such as this comprises a large part of Downs and Murtazashvili's comprehensive examination of the relationship between the military and the university in contemporary America. But it is not the only narrative told in the book. The other sections include a theoretical overview detailing the authors' intellectual framework and driving questions, as well as a thorough survey of security studies programs at major universities across the country. But it is the ROTC/Ivy League story that occupies center stage.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the association between the academy and the military has been at best a reluctant partnership. The passage of the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” (DADT) legislation in 1993, which barred openly gay service members from serving, only deepened the rift. The passage of the Solomon Amendment in 1996, which gave the Secretary of Defense the ability to withhold funds from universities that prohibited ROTC recruitment on their campuses and was upheld in an appeal to the US Supreme Court in 2006, added to the tension. It gave a specific twist to the general question asked previously: Should universities allow the military a presence on campus when at least some of its regulations run expressly counter to the stated intent of university charters and mission statements?
In the 1990s and 2000s, that problem was far from an academic exercise. Indeed, scholars of this specific issue considered it to be of paramount importance in untangling at least two strands in the complex web of state/society interactions in contemporary American society (e.g., see Clay Calvert and Robert D. Richards, “Challenging the Wisdom of Solomon: The First Amendment and Military Recruitment on Campus,” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 13 [2004–5]: 205–44; and Geoffrey M. Wyatt, “The Third Amendment in the Twenty-First Century: Military Recruiting on Private Campuses,” New England Law Review 40 [2005]: 113). Many scholars saw DADT as only the most public evidence of the growing “gap” between the academy and the military, and indeed between the military and society as a whole (e.g., see Gary Schmidt and Cheryl Miller, “The Military Should Mirror the Nation: America's Armed Forces Are Drawn from an Increasingly Narrow Segment of American Society,” Wall Street Journal, 26 August 2010; and Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security, 2001).
Yet in 2011, only a few short months after the repeal of the DADT legislation, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities readmitted ROTC to their campuses, implying that the disconnect between the university and the military (at least in the case of these Ivy League schools) was not so much a fundamental question of identity as it was a fairly straightforward anti-discrimination stance that was easily reversed once the offending piece of legislation was repealed. Downs and Murtazashvili strongly agree with this sentiment and indeed argue that the military as a whole (and not just ROTC) deserves to have a greater role in both the academy and in the public's perception (pp. 28–34, 411–20). In what is the most explicit treatment of civil–military relations in the volume, the authors mention the Defense Department's funding of social science research through Project Minerva (pp. 381–82) and look extensively at security studies programs at MIT, the Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (pp. 388–93) as evidence that the military (or at least the security establishment) already has a presence in the American academy. They here place themselves firmly in the camp that thinks any discussion of civil–military relations needs to operate from an informed perspective on both sides.
The security studies survey and the pedagogical overview embedded within the book, however, take a back seat to the tale of how Columbia University (standing in here for the rest of the Ivy League) brought ROTC back to campus. Indeed, ROTC almost serves as a stand-in for the military as a whole, and Columbia for the academy. This raises the one major objection to the organization of the book: its scope. Downs and Murtazashvili note early on (p. 5) that their analysis of the military presence in the American higher educational system “beckons a broader inquiry into the meaning of higher education itself.” Indeed, the subtitle of the book implies that it will undertake a thorough discussion of the impact of a military presence on the American university system. This is a worthy goal and an admirable subject of inquiry, but it falls a bit short in the end. While three chapters (or roughly 20%) are in theory dedicated to this question, the authors really only discuss it at length in Chapter 2 and revisit it in the conclusion, preferring instead to devote much of the book to the treatment of the evolution of the academy/ROTC relationship. This is understandable, given the timeliness and inherent attractiveness of this topic, but it makes the theoretical section of the work suffer by comparison.
This issue notwithstanding, Arms and the University should be included in the reading lists of ROTC programs nationwide. In addition, it represents an important contribution to scholarship in security studies and on civil–military relations more broadly.
