Dear Editor,

Keith Sudheimer’s recent Op-Ed regarding the potential return of ROTC to the Stanford campus (“Darth Vader Says ‘Yes’ To the ROTC“) illustrates an ideologically extreme and unproductive understanding of military service. Sudheimer argues that since soldiers in the field are obliged to follow orders regardless of their moral positions, military service is antithetical to the intellectual goals of the university. In so doing he misunderstands the nature of the ROTC program and disregards the structure of government through which military decisions are made.

Though obvious, it bears emphasis that ROTC is not compulsory military service. ROTC programs give students the option to take part in coursework and training leading to a commission as a military officer upon graduation. Official sanction of ROTC in no way constitutes approval of military actions or doctrine. Further, the strictures of military service relate not to privately held morals, but to behavior. The military is not the Thought Police, eradicating heterodoxy among its members. Rather, it expects actions consistent with the interests of the United States.

These interests may lead to orders that run counter to the morality of individual soldiers. Service members are in these cases generally obliged to follow orders rather than the dictates of conscience (though they are educated — in ROTC — to test their orders against their duty to the Constitution and to the law). Sudheimer seems to prefer a world in which each individual holds absolute moral veto authority over matters in which he is complicit. One in which the Iraq war would have been funded by the taxes of only those who deemed it just, and in which a pharmacist can refuse contraception to an unmarried woman. Such a world has its appeals, but it is not the world we live in. Rather, our society enacts laws via representative legislatures, laws binding to all citizens regardless of their moral stances. By participating in the social contract, we are complicit in acts we find morally suspect. If we wish to eliminate those acts we do so through political advocacy and not, for instance, by rehearsing baseless stereotypes about the military and ignoring its realities.

One can argue that there is a qualitative difference between my funding an unjust war and a soldier fighting it. But to say that the spirit of the university must encourage the former and discourage the latter is contradictory. The solution to both moral quandaries is engagement in government — electing legislators and executives who will declare only just wars and conduct them ethically. It is not putting up barriers to students who wish to serve their country. Ultimately, however, ideological concerns are secondary. Until peace reigns, the United States will have a military that requires ambitious, talented officers to lead it. In evaluating the ROTC program, universities must decide to what extent preserving a trifling ideological purity outweighs the good that future classes of freethinking, morally astute officers could do for their country and the world at large.

Regards,

Samuel Lederer, Ph.D. Candidate, Physics