The College's Board of Trustees' decision to retain the Reserve Officers' Training Corps is similar to recent decisions made by Trustees at Harvard and Princeton Universities to extend the program.
But campus debate about ROTC has been more intense at Dartmouth than at any other Ivy League school.
Brown University phased out ROTC in the 1970s for reasons unrelated to the issue of gays in the military, which is the driving force behind protests at Dartmouth.
And students at Columbia and Yale Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, where the program is run off campus, said the issue has attracted little debate. Cornell University's program is required to be on campus, but students there have had few words of protest as well.
Students on most campuses said the financial aspect does not figure largely in the debate. Supporters of ROTC at Dartmouth - and the College's Trustees - argue that depriving ROTC cadets, who currently number 33, of their scholarships would be discrimination. ROTC pays for 80 percent of a student's tuition, up to $80,000 over four years.
Princeton
Last weekend the Trustees faced a similar dilemma to the one Princeton's Board of Trustees faced last November when it voted to retain the school's 55-member ROTC program. Princeton's Board stated it was in the national interest for Princeton graduates to serve in leadership positions in the military.
Prior to the meeting, Princeton's faculty voted 42-33 to urge the Board to discontinue ROTC, according to Lt. Col. John Dotsey, who is involved with the univer-sity's ROTC program.
Harvard
At Harvard, the debate over the continuation of the program followed a similar path as at Dartmouth, whose Trustees in 1991 pledged to remove ROTC from the campus if the military did not lift its gay ban.
In 1990, then Harvard President Derek Bok wrote the U.S. Defense Department saying the university would discontinue ROTC if the military did not lift its ban on the homosexuals.
But before the deadline passed Harvard changed leadership and President Bill Clinton was elected with promises to lift the ban. Anticipating a change in the military's policy on homosexuality, the university has backed off and ROTC remains an option for students.
"It seems like very few people are up in arms about ROTC," a Harvard student said.
Several dozen students participate in Harvard's ROTC program through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The program offers military, naval, and air force training.
Brown
At the other end of the spectrum lies Brown University, which removed ROTC from campus fully in 1972. But the debate at Brown did not center around the issue of gays in the military, like at Dartmouth.
In 1968 ROTC professors demanded full faculty status from Brown. When the Brown faculty voted against this, the University decided to phase out the program over the next four years.
Cornell
With the exception of Cornell University, ROTC programs in the Ivy League are conducted off campus and are not funded by the schools.
Cornell, as a land grant university, is required by the national government to have some type of military training on campus and therefore ROTC's future is not a matter of debate, a reporter at the Cornell Sun, the daily college newspaper, said.
But Capt. Steve Jones, who is part of the army sector of Cornell's ROTC program, said although the college must provide some form of military training, it does not have to be ROTC. "A course in military history would fulfill the requirement," he said.
Debate raged at Cornell in the fall of 1992 when it was discovered that the Navy ROTC program was demanding that its students sign documents stating they were not gay. But since then Cornell's naval ROTC program has discontinued this practice and the protest has subsided, the reporter said.
Yale, Columbia, U. Penn
At Yale University, where about 20 students are enrolled in the off-campus program, debate has died down as well. Yale senior Kathy Allen, a former co-convenor of Yale's student gay and bisexual organization said, "There is no debate here. I guess because it's off-campus."
At Columbia, only a small handful of students participate in the program, which was moved to nearby Fordham University in the late 1960s because of the military's stance on homosexuality, according to Columbia's News Service.
"It's pretty much a dead issue," said Columbia Junior Tina Alexander, co-chair of the students' gay and bisexual organization.
To settle campus debate about the program, U. Penn has formed an ad-hoc committee, comprised of students, faculty, staff and ROTC cadets, to decide the program's fate, a reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian said.
Until the committee comes to a conclusion, the university's president and provost have decided to continue the program, the reporter said.
