This week's Time magazine reports on the Christian evangelism that is being encouraged at the Air Force Academy by the increasingly bold and intolerant establishment. This revelation, drawn out through reports in past weeks, after a long period of unproven allegations, only serves to increase the depth of my feeling that ROTC must be reintroduced to liberal campuses that have banned the program for the post-Vietnam era. It is an indisputable fact that the makeup of the military's officer corps, in terms of political beliefs, have shifted from largely liberal, with a huge portion nonreporting, to largely conservative, with a huge portion still nonreporting. While some of the shift can be attributed to the shift of the military to all-volunteer, that does not cover the whole shift.

In Evan Wright's book, Generation Kill, in which he tracks the Marines First Recon unit as it storms into Iraq, we meet Lt. Fisk, a Dartmouth grad with liberal political tendencies. As I noted on this blog previously, he directly addresses, from his experience joining the military after attending a college that had banned ROTC, issues I have raised:

"Despite his cavalier humor, Fick finished at the top of his class in Officer Candidates School and near the top of the Marine Corps' tough Basic Reconnaissance Course. He is also something of a closet idealist. His motivation for joining the Marines is a belief about which he is quietly passionate. "At Dartmouth, there was a sense that an ROTC program, which the school did not have, would militarize the campus," he explains. "They have it backward. ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country."

When we see the conservative religious values being introduced at the Academy, in large part I would assume because there is little intellectual opposition present anymore, I would argue it makes it even more imperative that we agitate at Columbia for the presence of ROTC on liberal university campuses.