A lot has certainly changed in our national culture since the terrorist attacks, nowhere more so than in the city which bore the brunt of them. Flag-waving and overt displays of patriotic feeling abound in even the most liberal districts of Manhattan. Red Sox fans openly confess to rooting for the Yankees in the World Series in gushy letters to the New York Times. Tourists in the Big Apple now wear T-shirts inviting locals to be rude to them, as if in humble solidarity with the famously brash, aggressive New Yorkers who died in such horrifying numbers on Sept. 11.

Not every neighborhood in Manhattan has been infused with patriotism, however. When Colonel John Dooley, director of New York City’s Army ROTC program, dropped by Columbia in the weeks after Sept. 11 to ask about re-introducing ROTC education grants to the pool of options advertised in the financial aid office, he was given the same cold shoulder the ROTC has long been used to receiving in the Ivy League. Dooley was not even trying to recruit from the broad pool of undergraduates; he merely wanted access to Columbia’s nursing program. This was denied him, on the specious grounds that Columbia’s acceptance of federal funds disqualifies it from allowing ROTC recruiters on campus (in the fact the law says the opposite: universities receiving public money from Washington are required to permit the ROTC to operate).

When I called Columbia’s public affairs office to inquire about the effective ban of the ROTC on campus, I received an even more specious-sounding legal rationale: the faculty had disallowed the program back in the 1970s because they didn’t want students skirting graduation requirements by using ROTC training classes for academic credits.

Because Columbia receives public funds, Dooley could have invoked the law to break through this polite resistance and force the ROTC onto campus, but he saw little point in "browbeating" his way in. Dooley's reasons are revealing. Other NYC-area universities, such as Hunter College and NYU, continue to supply future cadets to ROTC on a regular basis. But though the ROTC "would love to have Columbia students," Dooley told Boundless, the "cultural mind-set" of this Ivy League school remains "a very difficult nut to crack." After all, Dooley remarked matter-of-factly, "a lot of people at Columbia probably think the U.S. deserved the World Trade Center attacks."

We have become so accustomed to hearing about the loony political views common at America’s elite universities that such statements no longer shock us. But they should. With a war of potentially unlimited duration on, we have a great need for qualified, highly educated nurses, physicians, and of course soldiers, who are willing to serve their country. But the U.S. armed forces are not, apparently, going to find many of them at Columbia.

Nor, it seems safe to say, will military recruiters make many inroads at either Harvard or Yale, despite well-publicized alumni campaigns at both venerated institutions to bring back the ROTC. Don’t hold your breath for a major push at Cornell either, where memory of a 1998 scandal involving several students discharged from ROTC upon being identified as homosexual still lingers. (In a memorably absurd comment typical of anti-ROTC activism, Gwendolyn Dean, director of Cornell’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center, accused the ROTC of "tacitly advocating harassment and terrorism" Ñ against its own cadets.)

It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of antipathy towards the ROTC on the Left in America. Scour the web, and you will find all kinds of information about how to sabotage the military’s campus recruiters, from "anti-ROTC" action networks to lesbian-gay resource centers to outfits with revealing names such as the "War Resisters League" and the "National Campaign to Demilitarize Our Schools." Then, of course, there is the ACLU, which according to conservative leaders such as Elaine Donnelly, of the Center for Military Readiness, may yet succeed in a quixotic effort to overturn the 1981 Supreme Court decision which upheld the military’s right to "sexual discrimination" in the Selective Service. If feminists, gay-rights activists and the ACLU take their "anti-discrimination" campaign to its absurd conclusion, pretty soon the Selective Service would be registering even man-hating, war-opposing lesbians.

One hopes the exigencies already brought about by the war on terrorism will put a stop to much of this nonsense, but as yet there are few signs of a reality check in the rarified, anti-ROTC atmosphere of the Ivy League. This is unfortunate, for the divorce between America’s greatest research universities and the military impoverishes both unnecessarily. ROTC recruiters never tire of citing the Army’s desperate need for the kinds of bright minds and "independent thinkers" needed in today’s mobile, high-tech military; and yet many of the most promising candidates remain all but off limits to them.

Meanwhile, the pampered students of elite institutions like Harvard and Yale drift ever further into an intellectual atmosphere of moral relativism where serious engagement with issues of national security is frowned upon. The once-revered discipline of military history is all but dead at most prestigious universities, even while increasingly frivolous "majors" like gender or peace studies — that make no effort to disguise their contempt for patriotism, valor, honor, and all the values necessary to a well-functioning military — abound.

Some of the Army’s ongoing recruitment problems, to be sure, can be traced to the unprecedented prosperity of the 1990s, which gave students so many attractive economic options, both before and after graduation, that ROTC seemed to have little to offer them. At Stanford, where I was an undergraduate in the mid-1990s, I met all of one ROTC student in four years — and although she gladly took the Army’s money for several years, she actually finked out on the service requirement when a better financial aid package came through.

The economy’s recent tailspin may make the ROTC seem like a more attractive option to prospective college students, especially now that the war on terrorism has helped restore the military’s social prestige more generally. This could even happen in the Ivy League — even at those schools which continue to ban the organization from campus. Harvard students have access to the ROTC’s MIT office; Columbia’s can use the recruitment center at nearby Fordham.

But campus-wide bans on the ROTC still have a devastating effect on the Army’s recruitment possibilities. Take the difference between Columbia and Princeton. Princeton remains a notable exception to the anti-ROTC bias in the Ivy League, in part due to a gentleman’s agreement the recruitment office struck with University President Harold T. Shapiro in 1996. It allows the ROTC to remain active on campus, so long as its programs are advertised in university literature with a mandatory written disclosure that the Army’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy regarding openly homosexual servicemen violates the university’s anti-discrimination policy. While it seems pathetic that ROTC had to grovel in this way to retain the right to recruit at Princeton, the success rate there (with over 20 student-cadets) is conspicuously better than at ROTC-free Columbia (which has all of one student enrolled to serve his country).

It is a true shame that the ROTC has so little visibility in the Ivy League, whose hallowed halls could certainly benefit from even a small dose of patriotism to counter the prevailing anti-Americanism of liberal students and faculty members. Who knows? If Yale, Columbia, and Harvard brought back the ROTC, there might even be a wave of enlistments. Sure, there would be protests too (campus liberals will probably never forgive ROTC for "discriminating" against gays), but why not give it a try?

If nothing else, a new round of anti-ROTC protests in the Ivy League would force students to examine the issue of military service, and contemplate what it is that makes certain young men and women choose to risk their lives to defend freedom. Maybe then some of America’s future leaders could learn to distinguish between the facile reasoning and indulgent morality of "peace" activists and the courage and honor of those serving their country. You don’t have to sign up yourself to appreciate the sacrifices made by those who do.

So let’s all work to restore the ROTC to universities that insist on banning it. Let the campus protesters have their old punching-bag back. As soon as they open their mouths, it will be evident they have little to say.