Larry Summers Speaks Up for ROTC; Gets Fired

Harvard ROTC

CommissioningThese two events are not connected. Directly.

Causation? Maybe. Correlation. Certainly.

Your Business Blogger was recently reminded that it is possible to get an army commission at Harvard.

Lefty gentleman Jody Wheeler writes/links in Fluke that it is not impossible these days to get an ROTC commission at Harvard.

Sort of.

Raphael C. Rosen, co-authors Profile in Courage in Jim Glassman’s TCSDaily. Rosen notes about Harvard President Summers that,

Yet another controversy has been the place of the military on campus which, in Harvard’s case, is effectively non-existent.

But Wheeler is right.

But.

The military program is effectively non-existent; is a head fake. For two reasons:

1) Cadets drill at nearby MIT, so as not to infect Harvard with any sense of patriotism, and

2) The ROTC program is supported with private funds.

Harvard lent only the logo to the commissioning. And its hated president, Larry Summers. The commissioning was cheered by the hated Rumsfeld.

Richard Posner writes on the Summers Resignation,

Larry Summers at the commissioning

A few comments portray Summers as a political reactionary, noting for example his effort to bring back ROTC to Harvard. Summers is of course a Democrat who served in the Clinton Administration. He recognized that it was not good for Harvard to be monolithically left wing. As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, a person’s critical faculties are apt to atrophy if he is surrounded by like-minded people who do not question his ideas and opinions. Nor would it be inappropriate for Summers to believe that Harvard’s influence on public policy is needlessly diminished by unpatriotic institutional decisions, such as excluding military recruiters and instruction from the university.

Fem-FearBut the Harvard ROTC commissioning ceremony is a start to bring back the Old School into the new world. If the feminists can be beaten.

After all, John Harvard was a Jesus-loving, Bible-thumping Puritan.

Harvard as a Divinity School. Now that would be Progressive.

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Thank you (foot)notes:

Read more on the Fem-Fear at Khankrumthebulgar

See Advocates for Harvard ROTC.

Also see segal org for ROTC funding at Harvard.

See Nothing on Harvard.

Full Disclosure: Your Business Blogger’s education was partially funded by the Army’s ROTC program.

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