Nearly forty years after the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) left the Stanford campus at the height of the anti-war movement, the presidential election has brought the debate over ROTC programs and on-campus military recruiting back into the national spotlight.

All three major presidential candidates have expressed their support for the Solomon Amendment, which allows the government to withhold funding from universities that do not allow military recruiters or ROTC programs on campus. At the Democratic Debate in Las Vegas on Jan. 15, presidential candidates Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) both said that they would enforce the Solomon Amendment if elected.

“One of the striking things, as you travel around the country, you go into rural communities and see how disproportionately they are carrying the load in this war in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan,” said Obama at the debate. “And it is not fair.”

In 2003, Stanford Law School joined a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment. The plaintiffs in the case argued that colleges should not be required to assist military recruiters because the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibits gays from serving openly, is discriminatory.

“Our objection was not to military recruitment on campus, only to the military discrimination policy,” said Stanford Law Prof. George Fisher.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the government, thereby making the military the only employer that does not have to pass Stanford’s anti-discrimination policy to recruit on campus.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain (R-Ariz.) has spoken adamantly in support of the Solomon Amendment and the presence of ROTC units on college campuses. When Columbia University hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September 2007, McCain criticized the school for inviting a suspected terrorist but preventing ROTC to return to campus.

“It is unconscionable that Columbia, Harvard and other great American universities remain closed to ROTC, whose graduates represent the bulk of the officers commissioned into our Armed Forces each year,” said McCain, a veteran of the Vietnam War, in a speech at the Hudson Institute on Sept. 27, 2007.

In addition to Columbia and Harvard, neither Yale nor Stanford offer on-campus ROTC programs. Since the Stanford faculty senate stripped the ROTC program of its University affiliations in 1969, Stanford’s ROTC students have had no choice but to commute to nearby universities to fulfill their ROTC obligations. They drive to UC-Berkeley, San Jose State or Santa Clara University to participate in the Navy, Air Force or Army programs, respectively.

Jeff Wachtel, senior assistant to President John Hennessy, said that there is currently no plan to bring ROTC back to campus. Any effort to convince the military to bring the program back to Stanford would first need to gain faculty support and then show enough student interest, he said.

“It has to start will the faculty,” Wachtel said. “New programs do not move forward without the support of the faculty.”

History Prof. Barton Bernstein testified against the ROTC before the faculty senate in 1969. He opposed the program on the grounds that it did not meet the University’s academic standards and its purpose was to “train for the military in an unjust and brutal war.”

Greg Boden ‘09, a naval cadet who trains at UC-Berkeley, believes that it is unfair to deny academic credit to ROTC students for the military courses they take. The nine-quarter units he earns each year through the ROTC program would earn him a minor in Naval Studies if he attended UC-Berkeley. He said that the naval courses may not be especially difficult, but they prepare him to be a future naval officer.

“I would challenge students here to take navigation and see how they do,” said Boden. “My navigation class is harder than an IHUM course.”

History Prof. David Kennedy, who supports the return of ROTC to Stanford, believes that Stanford and other elite universities that do not offer on-campus ROTC programs are missing out on a valuable source of leadership.

“The universities that consider themselves the primary incubators of leadership have cut themselves off from a valuable resource,” said Kennedy.

Some Stanford ROTC students are nonetheless skeptical about the viability of a Stanford unit. Ally Ha ‘09, an Army cadet who trains at Santa Clara University, believes that the Stanford ROTC program has not returned because there is not a lot of interest in it.

“Having an ROTC program on campus would take a lot of energy,” she said. “And I’m not sure whether there would be enough interest to keep the program going.”