Columbia University's 2014 U.S. Navy and Permanent War Machine Connection

In 2014, the Columbia University administration is again involved in the training of U.S. naval officers for the U.S. power elite's permanent war machine. As the Columbia Daily Spectator student newspaper noted in an October 1, 2013 article:

"One year after quietly moving back onto campus, the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps [NROTC] celebrated its return to Columbia with fanfare...University President Lee Bollinger and Juan Garcia III, assistant secretary of the Navy, officially welcomed the program back after its 44-year ban...At the event, hosted at the Italian Academy, Bollinger...expressed his support for the program.

"'There is no good reason why our great academic institutions should not offer it,' he said. `Columbia has a historic, very close relationship with the armed forces.'..."

Yet as David Cortright's 1975 book, Soldiers In Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War observed, during the Vietnam War Era "growing anti-militarism...led to trouble in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program, the main source of junior officers. Total college ROTC enrollment dropped from 218,000 in the 1968 academic year, to 87,807 in 1971-72, and 72,500 in 1972-73....From 1969 to 1972, thirty-eight ROTC units were expelled from college campuses, largely because of pressure from radical student activists. The latter years of the war thus produced an immense increase in student resistance to the military..."