Introduction
At the faculty meeting of October 5, 2011, during discussion of the President's remarks on the ROTC report, some faculty asked for more information from the minority who disagreed with the report's third recommendation. This recommendation is that the President engage in conversations with the Department of Defense to explore expanding Brown ROTC options to services above and beyond the current Army arrangement with Providence College ROTC. The President asked whether the minority would be willing to release a memo it had written her after the report was submitted.
We had not contemplated making this memo public, but given these requests, we are willing to allow its circulation, with the following introductory provisos.
We ask that this memo to the president not be considered as if it were a full and formal "minority report," but rather comments on certain aspects of the final report. The four signees of this memo had both different and overlapping reasons for dissenting from the third recommendation, including some that are not mentioned in the memo. Furthermore, we believe that the final ROTC report represents a good faith effort to include a variety of arguments on all sides. However, we did feel that there are some key elements of our concerns not fully represented as matters of emphasis or substance in the final report. Given that, unless repealed, the federal legislation pertaining to ROTC would make it next to impossible for Brown to reverse a decision to expand its relationship with the program, we thought it important to highlight our concerns so that the President could take them into account fully in her decision.
August 3rd, 2011
A PDF of the minority report is available at the link below: