My understanding is that the Morrill Act (which established land-grant colleges) required said colleges to have mandatory instruction in military drilling for male students. After ROTC was created this become two years of ROTC for all male students. Am I wrong? When did Congress allow land-grant schools to make ROTC optional? When did the last college (that wasn’t a senior military college) drop the ROTC requirment?
I don’t see where the act says that students are required to take courses in military tactics, simply that courses in military tactics should be offered. The Attorney-General of the United States agrees with this assessment:
http://www.nasulgc.org/publications/Land_Grant/LGTrad_FirstMorrillAct.htm
There are some public colleges that require ROTC, or at least military training.
The Citadel, in South Carolina, actually has two parallel programs. The Corps of Cadets requires military training, while their night program students are not required to take it. Virginia Military Institute is another. New Mexico Military Institute is a state-owned military junior college that only offers two years of college-level ROTC.
That said, these are notable exceptions. No one at any university other than military universities is forced to join ROTC. In fact, the recruiting officer for my uni’s ROTC program specifically does not want people who think they’re forced to be there, and actively tries to dissuade them from joining.
Robin
My father mentioned there was mandatory ROTC back when he was in college (this would have been the mid-to-late 60s.) I’ve got nothing to back this up, but I’d bet that any mandatory programs would have crashed and burned after Vietnam.
OK, so as per Terminus Est’s post, by 1930 it was being interpreted by the chief law enforcement authority at the national level, that the Land-Grant colleges only had to make available ROTC, not necessarily mandate it. That would seem to mean that mandatory ROTC was all along a local policy decision.
I attended a Big Ten university starting in the fall of 1960. One year of ROTC was mandatory, just like physical education. Strangely enough if you were in the marching band (all male back then – there was a parallel bagpipe and drum outfit for women), marching band substituted for ROTC. There were two ROTC programs, Army and Air Force. Every Tuesday and Thursday the field house was filled with Freshman men in blue or green uniforms. The programs became elective in the mid-1960s as the war in Vietnam became less and less popular. That nearly killed it.
But then we had curfew for the women’s dorms, too.
I attended Purdue University from 1956 to 1960. ROTC was manatory for all male students during their Freshman & Sophmore years; Purdue was Indiana’s only Land-grant university.
Several years later after graduate school and becoming draft eligible I earned my commission as a US Navy officer by attending the Navy Officers Training Program.
Looking back I probably should have applied for the Navy ROTC program to get financial aid while at Purdue.
One of my bosses several decades ago had moved to Canada during the Vietnam War. He mentioned he got kicked out of his ROTC in college for leading the marching band in playing the Mickey Mouse Club March in front of a large group of visiting military VIP’s.
(He also mentioned that a lot of his fellow officer-wannabe’s graduated as lieutentants and many failed to return from the war.)
Are zombies able to join ROTC along with their still-living counterparts?
ROTC enrollment would change your draft status once college deferment was no longer automatic. However, by that time the war was winding down and fewer draftees were being called up at all. I imagine there was a brief uptick in enrollment at that time.
ack in the 60’s Naval Science classes were required for the Midshipmen at the state Maritime Academies. But then you had to be between the ages of 17 and 22, Male and never married. And almost everyone had to take the Naval Science classes and apply for a USNR-R commission at graduation. There was an exception for veterans they could opt out, but then they did not receive few hundred dollars from the Maritime Administration each trimester.
Things have changed much. Now women are admitted and there is no age or marriage limitation. And at the start of the 3rd class year the “cadets” (now they are cadets) they have the choice to declare for the Naval Science option.
I know that in the past, at least some physical education was required at many if not most colleges. As recently as the early 1980s, I know that this still existed for students younger than 18 at some California community colleges. At one time, you couldn’t graduate from UCLA without being able to swim the length of the pool.
Wasn’t it true that male students could fulfill the gym requirement by taking ROTC?
At my (private) college you had to swim a half mile (35 laps) in order to graduate, but if there was an ROTC, I was unaware of it.
I work at Purdue now, and there are a lot of Air Force ROTC people in the Aerospace courses. Last spring, I even had a Navy guy in senior design. I didn’t even know there was a Naval ROTC on campus, but he assured me there was. (Perhaps not as big as the AF presence.) Needless to say, he is headed for a career in Naval Aviation.
You’d be surprised. The Navy is free to take someone with a degree in, say, aerospace engineering and put them on a submarine right next to a political science major.
So even if this student has been selected for a pilot or flight officer spot, it was hardly a done deal by virtue of his area of study (that is, it did need to be said).
Yes, there are lots of things that can derail plans to go aviation especially in the Navy. Not the least of which are medical issues that could pop up.
OK, then let me amend my statement to “He is headed to flight school and believes he is headed for a career in Naval Aviation.”
Ah, well, then as long as he avoids the *NAMI-whammy, he should indeed by on his way to a career in aviation.
*That’s the highly technical term the Navy uses to refer to people whose “medical issues,” as @Loach described, prevent them from being physically qualified for flight duty.
Or “Yeah, we know you trained for A, but we need you for B”. When the Analog Flight Simulator Specialist training I was in shut down twelve weeks in, they didn’t call me in to see if anything was available in the same general computer field-I was just told I was going to be a Crew Chief for B-52s and sent to another school.