An Army of One

A liberal education goes to war

By Elizabeth Maples

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When Scott Quigley doesn't have time to go back to his dorm room and change clothes before classes, he wears his uniform around the Brown University campus. It's not a statement, it's an issue of practicality-but his camouflage outfit instantly turns him into a curiosity. He knows the connotations that surround his Army Greens. A Brown senior and the commander of the Patriot Battalion at Providence College, Quigley knows that ROTC students are, and are likely to remain, a rare breed on Brown's campus. But Quigley says he likes the challenge; that is, in fact, the reason he came to Brown in the first place. Like many, Quigley will graduate this May with a degree in political science. Unlike many of his classmates, he will become an officer the United States Army's combat arms infantry branch.

Quigley will enter the army in a time of intense international conflict, and in a moment when the very notion of warfare is shifting. While searching for novel approaches to how we fight and win wars, the Department of Defense has adjusted its recruitment vision as well: It is eyeing Stanford, Harvard, and even Brown. Most top-tier universities banished the ROTC program during Vietnam, but the government has recently voiced its aspirations to regain its old turf, and to see to it that students like Quigley don't appear as out of place in the Ivy Tower as they do now.

The times they are a-changin'

Many Brown students don't know that participation in the ROTC program is even an option for them. The notion of ROTC on campus conjures up images of faded newsprint photographs of Vietnam-era student protests and evokes thoughts on the current administration's own war, rather than an idea for a viable extracurricular activity. In response to campus protests in the late '60s, Brown stopped allowing ROTC coursework to count toward graduation, and the military refuses to establish an on-campus program if an institution denies cadets credit.

Since ROTC's expulsion in 1969, the issue took a back seat to other concerns at Brown and at other top universities. Financial aid and need-blind admissions, affirmative action and minority issues, and gender equity in the sciences became the causes du jour. Dartmouth, Penn and Cornell quietly kept the military's training program open on their campuses-Dartmouth and Penn by choice; Cornell by law, as some of its schools are funded by the state-but their implicit endorsement of the program attracted little fanfare.

But with 9/11 and the war in Iraq, the issue of the military and the ROTC program has come back to the fore, both in American society as a whole and in the often insular world of academia. Dialogue doesn't necessarily mean change though, and the idea of reinstating ROTC on campuses-and of willing volunteers simply materializing out of the Ivy-encrusted woodwork-seems farfetched, particularly at Brown.

For years, the heartland has sent the most able bodies to the military-a trend that many leftists have criticized as highly unfair because of the way it targets members of lower socioeconomic brackets. Michael Moore illustrates this sentiment in Fahrenheit 9/11, which shows clips of Marine recruiters hounding teenagers at malls in suburban Michigan. Though the military stands by its recruiting policies, it does recognize the regional discrepancy. In a Wall Street Journal article from December 2004, one government official admitted that recruiting in New England and on the West Coast normally just doesn't work. People here don't take to the military.

The new push for ROTC outposts in the Ivy League, then, runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that recruitment is most worthwhile in red states, where it actually yields results. Instead, the Department of Defense has targeted top universities, in particular Harvard and Stanford, located in two of the bluest states of them all. "What does make the Ivy League appealing is simply the fact that it's good for the military to position itself amid all quarters of society," said Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary for military personnel policy, in the same WSJ article.

The Defense Business Board, which advises Donald Rumsfeld, put out a report in 2003 stressing the importance of putting ROTC back on elite campuses. The board worried about realistic road bumps-what happens if students don't enroll? Is it worth diverting the money from other campuses? And can the government foot the hefty tuitions that come hand in hand with a first-class education? But they still opted to put pressure on universities, and hope academia might reconsider the ROTC program. At Brown, the response has been negligible; at Harvard and Stanford, reinstatement could at least be in the realm of the possible.

Open them pearly gates

Quigley didn't need recruitment, though: his familiarity with the military started at home. When he was three years old, he used to watch his father get dressed in his Army Greens on the weekends. As Scott and his family moved throughout his childhood-from Pittsburgh to Grand Rapids, Michigan to East Greenwich, Rhode Island-his father's dressing ritual remained constant. As a member of the Army Reserves, Scott's dad would suit up one weekend a month and head to the local army base to train.

"That was the first experience I had with army life: seeing him dress up in uniform, and not really understanding what he did but always being very proud," Quigley said. "And I used to walk a little higher when I saw my dad in his uniform because he looked so stately and professional. He was my hero-still is."

After growing up in a conservative, military family and attending Bishop Hendricken High School, an all-boys Catholic prep school in Warwick, Quigley wanted a challenge. He had always dreamed of attending an Ivy League institution, and he wanted to encounter people whose views differed radically from those he had encountered before. But a year into his collegiate career, Quigley felt like something was off. When he talks about that year, he also mentions the WTC attacks, using the same rhetoric that many adopted in that post-9/11 world in which irony was dead and life was precious. He still can't quite articulate what was lacking in his first year at Brown, or what compelled him to join the ROTC, but he found whatever it was in the military science wing of Providence College's Peterson Recreation Center, which houses the ROTC program.

Though the military does not operate an ROTC program at Brown, it considers the university a satellite school, meaning that it can send its students to the closest campus that does have one. Quigley commutes about three miles to Providence College, along with the sole other ROTC participant from Brown, junior Mike McBride. Three mornings a week, the two attend physical training at 6 a.m. and on Wednesday afternoon they go to classes and leadership labs-hour-long instructional sessions on security check points, battlefield first aid and the handling of rifles with bayonets. The cadets who attend Providence College as regular students take the ROTC program as an academic class and receive credit in the Department of Military Science for their participation.

Brown does not extend credit to Quigley and McBride, thus rendering their participation in the ROTC program to an extracurricular activity. For both cadets, the course credit, or more precisely, the lack thereof, is insignificant. They see the ROTC as a service and duty that they need to fulfill, and they like the camaraderie. At Hendricken, Quigley played ice hockey and baseball, and he served as the student body president. For him, serving as the commander of the Patriot Battalion is the culmination of his long-standing commitment to leadership and service, and his enthusiasm for sports and physical activity. Neither Quigley nor McBride view their choice to join the ROTC as a political one: they say that politics happen at the Pentagon, and in their minds, leading men in the field is 100 percent apolitical.

Quigley said that most people, expecting yelling and a healthy dose of militancy, are surprised by morning physical training sessions. These sessions have brought in many Providence College students into the cadre and subsequently the military-they've come to a few morning practices to get course credit, and have decided that they enjoyed the ROTC program and wanted to stick with it.

And besides the 'Morning, sir's' and the initial formation at 6:30 a.m.-when all cadets line up according to year, salute the battalion flag, and march in time-the training seems downright mundane. People talk about Parents' Weekend and the winter flu, and joke around with their officers while stretching their quads. The sing-song "UP!" "DOWN!" of push-up counts echoes a call-and-response jazz tune rather than the voice of drill sergeant. To the casual observer, it all looks like training for a championship tournament, not armed combat.

It's nice, but it's no West Point

The Department of Defense talks about the initiative to reinstate the program at top universities as an effort to bring the military to different corners of society. Quigley, though, firmly believes that the decision is inherently linked to the changing nature of warfare. In an age when war has moved from the battlefront to the new frontier of 'hearts and minds,' officers need a liberal education. Quigley thinks those who have participated in ROTC while attending top-tier universities bring a special mindset to the battlefield-a unique product of a liberal education that even West Point grads can't match.

Quigley genuinely believes this, but he admittedly has a little bit of West Point envy. He mostly longs for the Academy's regimented architectural tradition: the flags, the statues, the sacred hallways, the manicured campus lawns. Providence College Athletic Center looks just like it sounds-like a big, generic gymnasium. But whenever Quigley thinks he might have missed out by not attending the Academy, he reminds himself that he has a different brand of preparation that West Point can't beat.

"They only fire [guns] once a year. Sure, they can march better," Quigley said as he navigated his car through the windy streets of College Hill on his way home from one morning PT. "But I fired three times this year."

Quigley will put his training into practice in a few months, when his extracurricular becomes his career. On the bulletin boards in the Military Science Department at PC, there are photographs of former cadets, alongside letters back to their old battalion. Most of those PC alums are in Iraq, or about to cycle in. For the current cadets, fighting in Iraq is a real possibility. Quigley, though, isn't scared. Defending his country is a service that he has chosen, and he can't consider fear. He sees himself as a warrior, protecting the values that he says his country stands for. He says that he is looking to win, and he thinks that if anyone should be scared, it should be his enemies. And soon, he will fight with a Brown diploma.

Elizabeth Maples B'05 envies Scott Quigley's job security

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