My intuition wants me to say the university should be a place focused on academia, not military training.

However, this line of thinking, with no modification, would also suggest we should have no football, no women’s center, no newspaper.

Of course there must be some balance between a campus free and open to everything under the sun and a campus focused strictly on academia, but finding it may be difficult.

The underlying factor here is to what degree non-academic activities are appropriate for a university.

To gauge the appropriateness of any group’s existence on campus, I recommend we subject said group to a three-question test:

(1) Does the organization claim to provide any benefits to the community and its members?

(2) Are the claimed benefits desirable as part of the community?

(3) Is the group or activity the sole or best way to achieve said benefits?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then the activity in question should be taken off campus.

This idea is derived from the belief that even if some organization is otherwise “neutral,” (that is, they don’t offer any specific positives, and they don’t contribute to anything detrimental) they are still absorbing community resources, and that in itself is a reason to “cut the fat.”

Keeping the test in mind, I turn to what I imagine the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, ROTC’s benefits to the community to be: (1) training to supply a necessary element of the status quo with recruits, (2) providing participants with money to go to school and (3) giving participants experience and leadership qualities.

The idea Appalachian’s ROTC training recruits for the military is a reason validating its existence does not satisfy the requirement that the benefits are desirable, considering the academic mission of the university.

While we can argue what role the military should play, how big it should be, etc., it is clear we do in fact need a standing military in this day and age.

It is less clear but also generally accepted that the military needs recruits.

However, I fail to see how the military needing recruits is the concern of an academic university.

If there is a need for that many more potential military personnel, then the government should open new military academies and/or increase enrollment in the current ones.

There is nothing about an academic community that constitutes a responsibility to supply the military with recruits, and there is nothing about taking members of an educational community and training them to be in the military that benefits an academic community.

The fact that the ROTC helps pay for college doesn’t help it pass this test either; providing help with tuition is an incentive that is far from exclusive to ROTC.

There are entire sites and networks devoted to making available all sorts of scholarships, from the obscure to the mundane.

There are grants and other types of financial aid ava­ilable to students.

Loans are even a viable, if not preferred, way to get otherwise unavailable funds to pay for college.

Many ROTC supporters will argue the program gives students leadership experience, but, like the money issue, this benefit fails to be exclusive to ROTC.

In fact, there are many organizations on campus (with no legal requirement for unquestioning loyalty and service) capable of giving students leadership experience more directly applicable to non-military jobs.

From where I stand, there is no reason justifying ROTC at Appalachian, even if one assumes that the concept of ROTC in general is necessary in some capacity in the nation.

Liles Neal, a sophomore political science major from Concord, is an opinion writer.

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