Last month, when it became clear that we were at last seeing real movement on repealing "don't ask, don't tell," I noted that it was a great day for ROTC:

It's high time--and when it's done, it will reverberate very interestingly indeed in higher ed, where a great many private colleges and universities don't allow ROTC on campus because of DADT. The thing is, those campuses for the most part have not allowed ROTC on campus since the Vietnam era -- when the issue wasn't gays serving in the military, but the military itself. Since the 1990s, though, faculties and admins at Columbia and Harvard, among others, have been quite explicit that they don't want campus-based ROTC units because they don't like the military's discriminatory policies. With DADT repealed, those campuses will be challenged to be as good as their words--and will be pressed to bring ROTC back.

Stanford phased out its on-campus army, navy, and air force ROTC units during the early 1970s in response to the Vietnam War and concerns about the academic quality of ROTC courses. Since then, Stanford students wishing to participate in ROTC have had to do so in Berkeley, San Jose, or Santa Clara--which amounts to tremendously long and disruptive commutes for students to take courses and train. In practice, that means that very few Stanford students participate in ROTC--and that the university is creating a barrier to participation that arguably violates the Solomon Amendment and that, more broadly, does a disservice to its own students and to the military's ability to function in close connection with civil society by recruiting educated citizen-soldiers and officers.

"The academic dimensions of this subject were negotiable 40 years ago; and there's no reason to think they won't be negotiable again today," emeritus history professor David Kennedy told the faculty. "To bring the discussion up to the present day, it's our perception--and it's shared by others--that our current policy and practice compelling the one dozen ROTC students at Stanford to go to Berkeley or Santa Clara or San Jose--depending on their service branch--for their ROTC training imposes a pretty unreasonable burden on them that we probably ought to think seriously of doing away with, by bringing that instruction back onto this campus in some form."

Watch to see if Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and others will follow suit.