GOOD SIGNS – AT 9:12 A.M. ET:  The term is "generational change."  Sometimes it's good and sometimes, as in the 1960s, it isn't good at all.  But one sign of good generational change these days is that ROTC is being welcomed back on "elite" campuses, in part because the young generation – the 9-11 generation – appreciates what the military is doing.  From the L.A. Times:

Reporting from Palo Alto -- On an early May morning 43 years ago, fire swept through Stanford University's Navy ROTC building, destroying a structure that had been damaged in another suspicious blaze just two months earlier.

No arrests were ever made in the two arson fires, but they came at a time of angry, sometimes violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War on college campuses nationwide. Those protests often targeted the closest symbol of the U.S. military, the Reserve Officers Training Corps — with more than 200 campus ROTC units reporting vandalism during that war.

Flash forward to a much different time.

On a recent afternoon, Stanford senior Ann Thompson wore her Army ROTC uniform with pride as she helped staff a recruiting table for the military training program at a campus activities fair. She chatted with visitors about the ROTC's scholarships as a few dozen students marched nearby to protest the program's likely expansion at Stanford.

"There definitely are people not supportive of ROTC, but we still have respectful conversations," said Thompson, 22, of Paso Robles. "I can't fathom anyone burning a building down."

Helped by the recession, more active recruiting and a sea change in student perceptions of the military, enrollment in ROTC programs on college campuses is booming.

It's the sea change in the perception of the military that's the critical point here.

Even with ongoing U.S. involvement in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, participation in the program has surged 27% over the last four years — to 56,757 men and women, according to the Defense Department. The military boosted the number of ROTC scholarships to help expand the wartime officer corps, and the recession made the offers attractive to students.

Today's college students, who never faced a military draft and whose childhood memories include the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are more receptive than their parents' generation to seeing fellow students in uniform.

COMMENT:  Also encouraging is the fact that faculties at "elite" schools seem to be coming around to an acceptance of ROTC.  This may be, in part, because younger faculty members are reportedly less ideological than the sixties contingent that they're replacing. 

Our side occasionally wins a few.

June 1, 2011