THE DECLINE AND SLIGHT RETURN OF ROTC AT ELITE SCHOOLS: An interview with the authors of Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students. It’s not about students, but about Baby Boomer nostalgia:

While many students or even their parents may not have participated in the struggle against military presence in universities, many administrators and faculty are still around who were there, so to speak. Many people we talked to expressed strong preferences about the military on campus. One former university administrator, upon hearing about the subject of the book, said, “This is a university, not a military training ground!” To understand why opposition persists, even though there is generational change in the student body, it helps us to think about universities from an organizational and institutional perspective. Once opposition to military presence became institutionalized in a university, it is hard to change since there is often very little and slow turnover in an organization. This organizational persistence helps us understand why opposition to a reasonable degree of military presence has proven hard to dislodge even when students seem more supportive of something like an ROTC detachment.

Further support for the notion that the politicization of faculty — and especially of administration — has damaged higher education’s ability to do its purported job.