Blowing the Dynamite

Dear Catholic Workers, friends, peacemakers and enemies,

It is with humility and joy that I report how I misrepresented the military officer training programs on Catholic campuses.

I usually ask in each letter on this subject for public officials to correct me if I am wrong. They usually ignore my letter and thus the message. In researching and writing a recent letter to the Provost of Marquette University listing the academic, ethical and moral reasons to close the officer military training programs at MU, I discovered two facts that I believe “blow the dynamite” of the message Teach War No More at Catholic Universities.

First, I knew the modern military had moved officer training away from academies and on to college campuses, with now 80% of military officers being trained in officer training programs at universities in ROTC, NROTC and AFROTC programs. However, I did not know that the 80% of officers training by the military on campuses are not required to take a course in the ethics of war while the 20% who receive officer training in military academies are required to take an ethics course.

Second, I discovered that I misrepresented the military training programs on Catholic campuses. I insisted that we call them base Schools or Departments of the Army, Navy/Marines and Air Force rather than the traditional way of calling them ROTC, NROTC and AFROTC. My mistake was made by my misunderstanding of the Solomon Amendment of 1996, “the popular name of 10 U.S.C. § 983, a United States federal law that allows the Secretary of Defense to deny federal grants (including research grants) to institutions of higher education if they prohibit or prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus.” I thought this meant that ROTC programs and military recruitment were required on all campuses. Military recruiting is required on all campuses, except pacifist schools, but not ROTC programs.

When researching the letter to the Provost I discovered much criticism against schools like Harvard and Columbia that receive hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal grants but do NOT have a ROTC program. I had understood ‘partner schools’, as they are called, as opposed to “host schools”, as partners to the Department of Defense. That was wrong. They are partners to the host schools who freely choose to host military training on campus. For example, Harvard, which receives over 400 million dollars a year of Federal grants sends its students interested in military training in ROTC to MIT. Columbia sends them to Fordham, a Catholic Jesuit institution.

These schools, like UWM and MSOE, locally, and the majority of colleges and universities in the country choose not to have a ROTC program on campus based on academic, ethical or moral reasons.

In fact, according to the USA Army Locater there are only 21 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States of America that have ROTC programs. Eleven of the twenty one are Catholic Jesuit Schools. (See attached list of Army ROTC base school on Catholic campuses.

This is good news. It means that all the efforts of Catholic Workers like Dorothy Day, Phil and Dan Berriagn and so many others to remove ROTC on Catholic campuses has paid off. It means that many of the colleges and universities that Dorothy Day refused to receive honoree degrees from because they had ROTC programs on campus no longer have them. Loyola of New Orleans, where Dan Berrigan refused to teach unless they dropped ROTC no longer has a ROTC military training program on campus. Phil Berrigan’s work traveling the country looking for recruits in the resistance to ROTC has paid off. See Catholic Workers and Military Training on Catholic Campuses.

A number of years ago at SOAWatch rally at Fort Benning a young student got in front of the crowd at a Jesuit Solidarity Day event and had the courage to denounce Jesuits Universities, like his own, from having their own school of the Army, ROTC. He was booed and cheered and after wards he shared his research with me. At the time 21 of the 29 Jesuit colleges and universities he listed had ROTC. If you check the attached list you will find there now is only eleven and the one he attended, Loyola of Chicago, is not on it.

Yes, Catholic Workers, we are winning in our resistance to ROTC on Catholic campuses. If you check the attached list of Catholic colleges and universities you will notice there are only two schools, Notre Dame and Marquette University that have on campus Schools of the Army (ROTC), Navy/Marines (NROTC), and Air Force (AFROTC). And there is only one Catholic Jesuit University that hosts all three departments of the military, Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Marquette also hosts the archives of the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day. What would Dorothy Day say about this message?

I will release the letter soon to the Provost of Marquette giving the many reasons, academically, ethically and morally, to close down the Schools of Army, Navy/Marines and Air Force on a Catholic campus. I am still waiting for his possible response. As always, my facts and ‘opinions of the truth’ are subject to correction.

If you find in these words a “call to action”, sign our Open Letter to Four Leaders of Morality in Milwaukee and ask what you can do to stop teaching war at Catholic colleges and universities by emailing us at .

For those of you that live in states, like Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota that do not have a Catholic university that chooses to have a ROTC program on campus, help the rest of us who say with Salvadoran Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuria, when talking about ROTC in 1985, ‘Tell the Jesuits of Georgetown that they are committing mortal sin because they are supporting the forces of death which are killing our people.’ (Father John Dear S.J. in National Catholic Reporter Online article — Jan. 8, 2008)

Catholic Workers of the USA unite and resist the forces of death on our Catholic universities campus. Bob Graf may be wrong but together we are the church that speaks ‘truth to power.’

Bob Graf