Surprise: NY Times Runs Cover Article in Support of R.O.T.C.

Quite surprising indeed.  The attitudes from the very same Ivy League schools that spawned Barack Obama have been notably anti-military, and anti-free speech (read that anti-conservative speech).  They are still using the “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing as a cop out.  For either the Times or any of the campus rags to say anything positive about the military is startling in the least.
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http://www.mrc.org/timeswatch/articles/2009/20091103030718.aspx?print=on

Surprise: Times Runs Cover Article in Support of R.O.T.C.

By: Clay Waters

November 03, 2009 14:01 ET

There was a  surprise on the cover of the special Education Life section of Sunday’s paper: A 3,000-word story by Michael Winerip, “The Ivy Corps and the R.O.T.C. Ban,” that offered a supportive view of ROTC on Ivy League campuses.

Winerip sympathetically examined the trials faced by a Harvard student enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps program:

In a speech last year, Drew Faust, the president of Harvard, congratulated seniors who had gone the extra mile to get their R.O.T.C. training. She meant it literally, and the extra miles they had gone were the least of it.

Harvard has not had a Reserve Officers Training Corps program on campus since antiwar protests in the 1960s shut it down. The handful of Harvard students determined enough to join R.O.T.C. must travel to Boston University and across Cambridge to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their training, under a system developed by the military that allows host universities to serve nearby campuses.

For the last four school years, several times a week, Daniel West, Joe Kristol and Dom Pellegrini, all training to become United States Marine Corps officers, had to get to M.I.T. or B.U. by 5:45 a.m. It was so early the subway wasn’t running yet.

“I’d be up at 4:45 to shave first,” Mr. Kristol said.

Sometimes, when they had the energy and the weather wasn’t too frigid, the three ran the half-hour to B.U. in the predawn darkness. Some days, Mr. Kristol drove them — he says that was the only reason he kept a car, which cost him $250 to $300 a month to park and maintain.

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This is the 40th anniversary of the antiwar protests that led to the ban of R.O.T.C. at some of the nation’s most elite universities — Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Tufts. And yet, the attitude on these campuses today is hardly antimilitary. There are numerous signs of genuine respect for the soldiers who serve. An editorial last May in the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which for decades attacked R.O.T.C., praised classmates who had joined the program. “They demonstrate a commitment to service that should be admired and followed by the rest of the student body,” The Crimson said. The Yale, Columbia and Brown student papers have all published editorials in the recent past calling for the return of R.O.T.C. to their campuses.

Winerip pointed out that even our liberal president thinks the Ivy ban on R.O.T.C. is a bad idea:

During a campaign visit to Columbia University, Barack Obama, a favorite on the Ivy campuses, called the R.O.T.C. ban there wrong. (R.O.T.C. students at Columbia, in Manhattan, go to Fordham University or Manhattan College, both in the Bronx, for training). “The notion that young people here at Columbia, or anywhere, in any university, aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake,” Mr. Obama said.

Winerip found a liberal excuse — the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy, which excludes open homosexuals from military service — but also relayed suggestions that citing that as a reason for the continuing R.O.T.C. ban was mere window-dressing to justify knee-jerk anti-military views.

 

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“No He Can’t”

Simply because she disagrees with the Obamassiah she will be castigated, ignored, and labeled as an Uncle (Aunt?) Tom by many the 96% of blacks who voted for Chairman Mao-bama. She will be treated just like Bill Cosby for voicing an opinion that differs from the theology of dependence and irresponsibility fostered by democrats and the left.

I probably don’t see eye to eye with Ms. Wortham on many issues, but she is obviously an intelligent person who has seen through the lies fed to blacks over the last three quarters of a century or more by the democrat party and the left. The left promises and promises, but they have never delivered on any more than enough to keep blacks dependent on government and the left. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a black and white racial issue. It is an issue of dependence vs. independence. It is an issue of power over the powerless. It is an issue of control. There are those in Washington and around the country who would use their power to ensnare and enslave ANYONE regardless of race. Megalomania knows no color. I hope that the black community will shed the bonds of dependence and join with all other patriotic Americans of all races to restore our country to what the founding fathers intended.

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Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer’s television series, “A World of Ideas.” The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas. Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness. Shortly after this interview she was awarded tenure.
— http://www.fullcontext.org/people/wortham.htm

http://www.plaintruth.com/the_plain_truth/2009/07/no-he-cant-by-dr-anne-wortham-.html
This letter was written in November after President Obama won the election, becoming the first black to hold the office. Dr. Anne Wortham Ph.D. is an associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University. Read today by Neal Boortz on the radio.

by Dr. Anne Wortham

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America .

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival – all that I know about the history of the United States of America , all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America . Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration – political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University ‘s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that “fairness” is the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead – and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine – what little there is left – for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.