Kagan deserves to be criticized for barring military recruiters

The United States military is not Procter and Gamble. It is not just another employer. It is the institution whose members risk their lives to protect the country. You can disagree with the policies of the American military; you can even hate them, but you can’t alienate yourself from the institution without in a certain sense alienating yourself from the country. Barring the military from campus is a bit like barring the president or even the flag. It’s more than a statement of criticism; it’s a statement of national estrangement…

And it hasn’t. Banning the military from elite campuses hasn’t only helped generations of Nixons, Atwaters and Roves beat Democrats at the polls; it has also helped create a military that stands firmly on the red side of the culture war. As Michael Neiberg shows in his 2001 book, Making Citizen-Soldiers, the Ivy League administrators of the early 20th Century believed ROTC served a fundamentally liberal purpose. It infused the military with the spirit of intellectual openness found in the academy and thus “prevent[ed] the creation” of a narrow, isolated “military caste.” Today, thanks to administrators like Kagan, however, the military recruits mostly on the campuses of the South and West, and thus, the officer corps has become overwhelmingly Republican. The best way for Ivy League liberals to remedy anti-gay discrimination in the military—and to infuse it with liberal values more generally—would be to encourage the military to recruit from among their ranks, as those administrators urge a century ago. Instead, actions like Kagan’s have helped make the Ivy League and the military separate and sometimes hostile worlds, and both have suffered as a result.