While running for president, Bill Clinton was able to win the support of gay-rights activists by pledging to remove the military's long-standing ban on homosexuals. With this and other pro-reform promises, he was swept into office by a plurality of voters who thought things needed to be done differently.
However, once the initial honeymoon period was over and it was time for Clinton to make some decisions, it quickly became clear that while many felt something needed to be done, not everybody agreed on exactly what, especially in the case of homosexuals in the military.
For Clinton to take a hard-line stance on either side of that conflict would undoubtedly have alienated a large bloc of voters. So what did the president do? He engineered a slick compromise to avoid offending either side - the infamous "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" policy - and then tried to turn his attention to safer issues such as health care and the economy.
But the problem was that during the campaign Clinton had brought the gays in the military issue into the national consciousness. It was now too controversial to ignore, and dissatisfaction with his policy lingered on. An unfortunate result of Clinton's cop-out was that it unwittingly "passed the buck" to universities and colleges, which then had the burden of choosing whether to keep their affiliations with the military through ROTC programs or to eliminate them in protest of the military's less-than-full acceptance of gays.
As the Board of Trustees' recent statement says, Clinton's policy left Dartmouth and other colleges in a no-win situation, forcing them to choose which group of students to deprive. Eliminating ROTC would eliminate the opportunity for students to gain valuable military experience during their college careers, and for some, the resulting loss of financial aid would make it impossible to attend college.
On the other hand, keeping ROTC would mean missing an opportunity to reject Clinton's cowardly sell-out of his gay supporters. Either way, someone would be offended, and the college would take a great deal of blame while Clinton, who had exploited the issue to win the election, would get off scot-free.
It is not fair to criticize the Trustees for disregarding gay rights - the blame for that should lie with the Clinton administration. The Trustees of Dartmouth and the other colleges that have faced this choice are as unhappy with the policy as anyone else. But they have a responsibility to the student body in general, not simply to a few students at the expense of others. Thus, in such a no-win situation, they must weigh each choice and find the option that is the least detrimental overall.
Had the military continued to ban gays outright, the Trustees would have had a much stronger reason to end the ROTC program. Because there has been some progress since the Board's earlier decisions, however, there is hope for more to follow.
Given this, the choice they made this weekend made the most sense of any of their options, and in my opinion, it was the right decision, albeit a tough one. Unlike President Clinton, at the risk of becoming unpopular, the Trustees have taken a strong stance. They did not succumb to political pressures and unnecessarily deprive students of the opportunity to participate in ROTC, but they also did not, as some claim, sell out and give up hope of gaining more acceptance for gays.
Those who would argue that public pressure - and possible lawsuits - cannot lead to further change in the military's policy are ignoring the facts. "If the military is not going to listen to President Clinton," argued the editorial in Monday's issue of The Dartmouth, "it is certainly not going to listen to the Board of a college." This typically one-sided view is both wrong and beside the point. If the military wouldn't listen to Dartmouth's Trustees, why would it pay attention if Dartmouth ended its ROTC program?
These people are forgetting that it was more the lack of an overwhelming public mandate than the objections of the military that made Clinton abandon his plan to end the gay ban in the first place. The president, after all, is commander-in-chief, and the military must follow his orders, but the voters can always toss him out. The racial integration of the armed forces in the 1940s is a good analogy; it too began with an executive order, and the military establishment of the '40s had no trouble following orders, even though it was against its wishes. Clinton abandoned his plans because he feared the effects on his popularity, not because he lacked the ability to institute them.
And it is not just Dartmouth's Board of Trustees that is putting pressure on the government to change its policy; this issue affects every college in the nation that has an ROTC program. Increased pressure from the nation's colleges could very well induce Clinton (or his successor) to go one step further. Like the racial integration of the military, it may not occur in one single step. But gradual change is still change, and Dartmouth will be in a far better position to influence the system from within than as an outsider.
However, for this to happen the opposing sides must end their useless bickering - the ROTC/gay rights debate is not a zero-sum game, as Brandon del Pozo '96 has pointed out in this newspaper. We can have both gay rights and military opportunities. It is only a question of time and of whether each side will realize that its goals are not mutually exclusive.
