by Darrin McMahon

Michael's Kazin's shrewd addendum to David Bell's excellent post on the isolation of military history in contemporary academia might be expanded still further. Not only has the lack of a personal connection to the military waned in many parts of the professoriate, it has waned in many of the highest echelons of American life. This is the sobering argument made by authors Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, both of whom have family members in the military, in their recently published AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service--and How It Hurts Our Country (Collins, 2006). Their case is compelling. Consider that as recently as 1956, 400 members of the Princeton graduating class of 750 served in the armed forces. In 2004, that number was down to 9. And Princeton is positively military friendly when compared to schools like Harvard or Yale, where the faculty decided in 1969 that ROTC programs had no place on a progressive campus of lux et veritas. Despite the efforts of a vocal minority, the ban has not yet been lifted. But perhaps the most dramatic change of all is in Congress, where almost three-fourths of the membership had military experience in 1971. Today that percentage is less than a third. Why is this a problem? Think about it this way. Just as academics have belatedly discovered that war doesn't go away simply by not thinking about it, international politics is not likely to foster peace in our time anytime soon (the laudable hopes of pacifists notwithstanding). Which means that it would be nice if the men and women sending young Americans off to war had some idea of what it means to serve. Roth-Douquet and Schaeffer cite Eleanor Roosevelt to the effect that FDR could not have imagined ordering others to fight if members of their own family were not in uniform. That egalitarian sentiment, I fear, is already a casualty, dying alongside America's wounded sense of civic responsibility.