Posted on 12/15/2008 8:03:41 AM PST by Pyro7480
Polls closed early? More votes disqualified than counted for either side? Individuals casting multiple votes? No independent, anti-fraud auditing?
Yes -- to all of the above. And, at the final result, by a 39-vote margin Columbia University students decided to renew the ban on ROTC classes at the Ivy League school.
In an episode reminiscent of the referenda conducted by Joe Stalin in the USSR’s heyday, Columbia University surveyed its students from Monday, November 24 until Monday, December 1 to gauge interest for the return of the Navy’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) to campus. Students currently have no option to participate in Navy ROTC in the greater Manhattan area.
Student leaders from Columbia’s Hamilton Society, the campus group which advocates for academic engagement of the military as a civic institution and promotes national service among students, have been calling for ROTC to return to Columbia. With the help of the student senate, a simple yes/no referendum vote was organized for all students, “Do you support bringing a Naval ROTC program to Columbia’s campus?”
The university officially conducted the referendum on the school’s computer network and scheduled it to take place, despite repeated requests to the contrary from concerned students on both sides of the question, during the week of Thanksgiving.
That’s right, instead of providing a full, normal academic week for students to vote on ROTC, as Columbia routinely does for other student referendums, they provided less than half the time during a holiday week -- amid days already overstuffed with term paper deadlines....
...President-elect Obama, himself a Columbia alumnus, visited campus in September and called for his alma mater and other Ivy-League schools to rectify the “mistake” of not offering ROTC on their campuses...
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
Probably not posted because it’s a dog bites man story. If they had allowed NROTC back on campus, that would have been a headline story!
Without a doubt the most valuable part of my college education came after graduation when I served three years in the US ARMY as an officer. Having serious responsibility at an early age teaches that which is impossible to learn any other way. A classroom only education is seriously deficient in usefullness.
These schools that ban ROTC are incredibly short sided as was best addressed by the President of Western Michigan University in about 1970. At a Faculty Senate meeting when a group of professors made their case to the University President to ban ROTC, that independent minded free thinking individual said roughly the following.
“The ROTC program is only about 20 credit hours of instruction total in addition to a summer camp. This compares to a total of about 130 hours of credit hours required for graduation. If you gentlemen seriously think the military officers teaching these courses can so easily counter act the over whelming number of hours you teach these students compared to the time these military officers teach them, then I especially don’t want ROTC banned. I want you professors to go study their methods of instruction so as to learn how to be more persuasive in your own courses.”
LOL... This really did happen. I was there and heard it myself.
Indeed. The Liberals' rank hypoctisy is never more evident that in banning the ROTC. They all whine about the "military mindset" yet the ROTC provides a constant influx of the "civilian mindset" to water down any of the fascist tendencies they fear so much.
Indeed, our university president (I truely wish I could remember his name) included remarks addressing this point, too. The man so humilated the cabal trying to eliminate ROTC they did not try it again to my knowledge in that forum.
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