Harvard links ROTC return to end of ‘don’t ask’ (xpost from GLBT)

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Harvard links ROTC return to end of ‘don’t ask’
By Tracy Jan
Globe Staff / September 23, 2010

Harvard University, which expelled ROTC four decades ago, will welcome the military training program back to campus only when the ban on openly gay and lesbian service members is repealed, the university’s president said yesterday.

Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, speaking the day after the US Senate declined to take up a measure that would have repealed the “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy, said vestiges of antimilitarism on campus dating to the Vietnam War are largely gone and she would now welcome the opportunity to “regularize our relationship’’ with the armed forces.

“We are very much looking forward to the end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ’’ Faust said. “It will be a very important moment to us when that happens.’’

Faust’s comments on the university’s relationship with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps came during a wide-ranging discussion with reporters and editors at the Globe, kicking off a day of events at which she sought to highlight the university’s contributions to the city of Boston.

During the interview, Faust reiterated Harvard’s commitment to developing a campus in Allston and said she expects her predecessor, Lawrence H. Summers, to prove to be an extraordinarily popular professor upon his return from the Obama administration to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in January.