What Higher Ed Owes to Veterans
Excluding veterans from elite institutions undermines democratic ideals.
I was interrupted by a veteran while teaching a seminar on human rights in 2010. The text didn’t match his experience in Iraq, he said. At the next class meeting I gave him the floor. He showed up in shined shoes, pressed slacks, and a button-down.
In front of that Arizona State University class, he moved as if looking through a gun sight. “Wait, wait, wait. Never fire until fired upon. You know your friends have been shot, have been maimed, have been killed, but you wait, wait, wait. And that” — he looked at his student peers — “is what we did.”
Experience representing the operational difficulty and ethical complexity of military service is uncommon on elite college campuses.
Nationwide, about 5% of undergraduates have military connections. In the most selective institutions, that number drops below 2%, often far lower. Some of these differences come down to elite colleges and universities’ propensity to work with 18–23-year-olds. Yet the military has also been excluded.
In Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-military Students, Professors Donald Alexander Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili trace the expulsion of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) units from Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities for four decades following the Vietnam War. While those campuses have ROTC programs today, the largest programs are at public universities and military-affiliated institutes that cluster in the South and West. Their research demonstrated a distancing of hard power from the halls of elite higher education, where significant military history and realist approaches were absent from several leading security studies programs.
Even at elite institutions with ROTC programming, students are less likely to hear about the sort of frontline experiences we heard in the human rights seminar. That would require broader inclusion of non-traditional-age students.
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Learning through the wisdom of others’ experiences
This is not merely about a sense of belonging. It’s about education: understanding the world, its politics, and their consequences.
Career Foreign Service Officer Carol Kalin picked up this theme in a dissertation on veterans in the Ivy League. She interviewed a Marine Corps Veteran attending Columbia, who remembered challenging a classroom consensus on the ease of implementing a no-fly zone. He detailed the operational commitments and possibility of deaths involved — certainties and likelihoods that his classmates hadn’t understood.
Whether civilian, military, or veteran, we owe one another educational pathways that reflect authentic equality of opportunity and create inclusive environments for deepening understanding through one another’s experiential insights.
The Vice President of the United States’ biography suggests how some institutions may fail to do that.
In Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance shares the sting of cumulative biases. As a law student at Yale, he feels his veteran identity and patriotism aren’t matched by many in the Acela corridor. If patterns of military enlistment are any indication, he’s right. Soldiers are more likely to come from The South and West. His working class experience cleaning up after others made him dissimilar from all but one of his classmates out one evening in New Haven, he writes. Here too, the data agrees. From selective R1s through liberal arts colleges, elite higher education institutions largely reproduce elite status. Place plays an important role too. Rural kids are more likely to live in what researchers call education deserts, far from any higher education institution.
Though the term is unpopular on the right, a concept that screams through Vance’s book is intersectionality. It’s not only that he was poor or grew up far from economically prosperous communities. It’s also that his people come from a historically excluded, rural Appalachian culture. And by the time he makes it into elite circles, he is also a veteran. Each of those aspects of Vance’s identity gave him a perspective that could have informed unique contributions to campus conversations — and each made him an outlier among his peers, as many other veterans also experience.
Part of the point of broad inclusion is that no single individual should ever represent any single category. Vance is a member of the Republican Party. His former Senate colleague Ruben Gallego is also a Marine Corps Veteran and first-generation Ivy League alumnus, yet his experiences lead him to serve as a Democrat. What’s troubling from the perspective of education for democracy is limited representation of and cross-pollination among experiences, categories, networks, and ideas on college campuses, a theme woven through veteran and Dartmouth alumnus Phil Klay’s Citizen Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military.
Would more broadly distributed military-affiliated inclusion yield different kinds of truths and analytical insights in higher ed classrooms? Downs and Murtazashvili (cited above) think so. Arms and the University is rife with examples of contributions growing from dissimilarity. The authors refer to this as “productive friction” between civilian and military worlds.
What does higher education owe the country and the individuals who serve in its military?
Considering inclusion from the vantage point of veterans is important, not only because they pledged their lives to support the political institutions that ultimately make excellence in higher education possible. It also reveals the ways in which structures of exclusion operate across our society and are accelerated through an educational system that struggles to serve middle, working class, and poor families in a broad and accessible manner. From a strategic perspective, for a sector seeking to rebuild public trust, it’s important to wrestle with the ways in which patterns of exclusion may undermine our capacity to have conversations on campus, while also fomenting resentment off campus.
At Ivy League schools, 17% of students come from families in the top 1% of income earners; more than 60% come from the top quintile. By contrast, the upper class is not well represented in the military. Middle- and working-class people who do attend college face disproportionate risk of going into debt yet failing to earn a degree. Yet whether veterans or not, those who attend elite institutions are far likelier to land one of the most influential positions across science, business, media, and politics.
For families from communities where the data suggests elite higher education is just “not for them,” it is easy to see how they might conclude that economic opportunity and mobility is not really for them either. Part of the mistrust of higher education may be rooted in this juxtaposition between rhetorically promoting democratic equality (a non-zero-sum ideal) and contemporary elite admissions pressures (a zero-sum game).
Additionally, students and scholars engaging in conversations isolated from hard power may too easily overlook at least one uncomfortable lesson of history: military strength supporting national security is a foundational component in any civilian-led government that ensures the fundamental conditions for open inquiry.
America, like many powers preceding it, has amassed stability, books, and laboratories enabling scholarly investigation. Over the last century, the US has benefited from the global flight of scientists, artists, activists, and innovators from totalitarian and oppressive regimes. We have had a deserved reputation for offering stability, investing in science, and supporting open intellectual exchange. That reputation is very much at risk. But let’s also be clear: it has never existed absent civilian-led and democratically restrained military power.
It’s past time for new innovation to ensure the individuals who take an oath to support and defend the Constitution receive access to a broad set of educational opportunities.
The challenges here, however, point to patterns beyond veterans alone.
Higher education can’t address these issues through its default response: fundraising and program innovation at single institutions competing with one another. We need better systems-thinking and coordination if there is to be anything like a renewed social contract between America and its universities. That will necessarily include educational opportunities supporting career development from among all economic classes and backgrounds, along with opportunities for renewal throughout one’s life journey. System innovation requires deeper thinking about K-16 pipelines, as well as partnerships among community colleges, regional 4-years, and elite institutions. It also indicates the importance of thoughtful state and national policies, positive government relationships, and good-faith governance.
A high-quality, empowering education should be affordable and accessible for all Americans — especially those who ensure our collective defense. Our classrooms, our educational institutions, and our democracy will be better for it.
Eric Hartman is a senior fellow and director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
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I worked in OSD--my entire career spanned the one "operation" of Afghanistan. I've never known or worked with finer people, military and civilian. Academia isn't the only one who should acknowledge them--the country would do well to recommit to their ideals as well, especially today.