At Harvard, Garland urged debate on ROTC (xpost from GD)

[unhappycamper]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/03/18/merrick-garland-obama-supreme-court-nominee-played-role-considering-rotc-referendum-harvard-student-leader/oGY1kSjRjuNkIPvJr0q7SI/story.html



Judge Merrick Garland.

At Harvard, Garland urged debate on ROTC
By Annie Linskey Globe Staff March 19, 2016

WASHINGTON — As a Harvard student government leader in the early 1970s, Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, played a key role in efforts to hold a referendum that would have asked students if the university should end its campus ban on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

The episode was an early test of Garland’s skills as a mediator on a highly emotional issue that roiled the university. More than 40 years later, it could give Senate Republicans opposing his nomination to the high court ammunition to say he did not sufficiently defend the US military in the face of left-wing activists.

Under pressure from a leftist group called the New American Movement, which had gathered 2,500 signatures, Garland asked a student-faculty steering committee to formally initiate debate on a campuswide referendum in October 1973 that asked whether the university should allow ROTC to return to campus, or keep its policy that effectively banned the group.

Garland sounded optimistic that the referendum would occur, predicting then that “chances are pretty good” that a larger student committee would sponsor the referendum, a key step in getting it before the full student body, according to an article at the time in the Harvard Crimson, the student-run paper, which chronicled the saga.

[madaboutharry]

1. Let them fight The Vietnam War over again.

Will see how far that gets them.