While most Dartmouth students disagree with the United States Army's "don't ask don't tell" policy, they still overwhelmingly support the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Dartmouth, according to a recently published Student Assembly poll. The poll, which was primarily conducted by David Zubricki '07 and Welton Chang '05, was designed to gauge support among Dartmouth undergraduates for ROTC.
The issue behind the survey was the possibility of awarding a $128,000 full scholarship through the ROTC program. Currently, the Army allocates money to both the nearby Norwich Academy and Dartmouth, forcing the ROTC participants from the two colleges compete for the $20,000-a-year scholarship. Yet because Dartmouth's ROTC program lacks the full support of College President James Wright, the military has been unwilling to increase scholarships. At other schools including Harvard, Notre Dame, Cornell, Boston and Stanford Universities, ROTC participants currently receive full scholarships.
Chang said that he believes Wright is conflicted over the direction the president wishes to go with ROTC.
"It's a big issue for President Wright. He's afraid of the faculty," Chang said. "He supports us in private, but doesn't want to offend them."
Wright was unavailable to comment on this particular issue.
Zubricki said he believes the point of contention with some faculty members is the Army's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Students, contrarily, support the ROTC while being split on their views towards the policy, he added.
Noting sentiment against the organization, Zubricki cited faculty members in the Arabic language department who asked ROTC recruiters to leave when they came to solicit students.
Following the faculty reaction, Zubricki was interested to see if the students who object to "don't ask, don't tell" still support ROTC at Dartmouth.
"I think there are a lot of students out there that don't support 'don't ask don't tell' but still support their classmates in ROTC," Zubricki said.
The significant findings of the survey showed that a majority of the students thought the administration should do more to help students in ROTC, despite the fact that the majority does not support the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Wright recently met with Army Gen. Alan Thrasher, the national commander of ROTC. Despite the joint meeting, any scholarship changes are still entirely at Thrasher's discretion, who Chang said will only provide more funding if the College administration shows greater support for ROTC.
"Those kind of guys can do whatever they want basically. I myself am not entirely optimistic about it," Chang said. "I hope [Thrasher] sees that it's worth the time and effort to build it up again."
Although apprehensive about students' responses, Chang was generally pleased with the results of the poll.
"The results were very favorable. Despite the liberal campus -- and I'm a very liberal person myself -- its good to see people were able to discern between the war and the army," Chang said.
Nearly a quarter of the students polled by the Assembly said that camouflage uniforms made them uncomfortable. Members of the ROTC are sometimes asked if they are patrolling or standing guard, according to Chang.
"The camo uniforms make people somewhat uncomfortable. It makes people stand out. They ask why we're wearing the uniform. They want to know if there's some sort of threat."
With Chang's recent graduation, ROTC at Dartmouth is left with only five members. Nevertheless, the program is expected to continue into the foreseeable future.
Chang's involvement with the Dartmouth ROTC program was most publicly demonstrated at the town hall meeting sponsored by the Student Assembly in February. At that meeting, Chang directed pointed questions to both Wright and Dean of the College James Larimore. He continued his crusade up until his graduation earlier this month.
