I noticed the welcome sign hanging from the fence of the ROTC building. Berkeley wants the revenue from the GI Bill for schooling.
Détente has come to Berkeley.
The University of California, Berkeley, once synonymous with antiwar activism, is expanding efforts to attract veterans and welcome the military to campus. For its part, the military is expanding ROTC on campus.
“Those old days are gone,” said Lt. Col. Stephen Suhr, an Army ROTC professor at the university.
The Army ROTC program has grown to 44 cadets currently, up from 32 in 2012.
Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has about 21 veterans out of a total enrollment of 487 and has worked to expand that number. Business school applications from veterans increased to 102 for the 2014 academic year, up from 39 in 2011.
Suhr said the anti-military reputation doesn’t fit anymore although the stigma associated with it sometimes hurts efforts to recruit ROTC students, who fear they will encounter hostility on the campus.
“They think there is going to be some backlash,” he said.
Ryan Evans, a 35-year-old former Navy SEAL and an MBA student there, said he came to the campus partly because he sought the cultural shock associated with jumping into a radically different environment after more than a decade in the Navy.
Evans said his Navy colleagues made cracks about Birkenstocks and pot smoking when he told them he was considering attending Berkeley.
The thaw between the university and the U.S. military comes as the cultural gap between the military and society has arguably never been greater.
The threat of the draft has long since been abandoned and the public professes support for the troops, even if many oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But that support doesn’t mean the public understands the military. Only a tiny fraction of the population has fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many students at elite schools like Berkeley rarely even have exposure to anyone in the military.
In fact, some administrators view the presence of veterans and the military as a way of expanding “diversity” on campus.