$80,000 Worth of Integrity

University of North Carolina senior Sara Isaacson was paying for her education with an ROTC scholarship. When she took the army’s core value of integrity to heart and decided to come out to her commander, however, he dismissed her from the program and “recommended” that she pay back the nearly $80,000 in scholarship money that she has received from the army so far. Standard ROTC policy is that students must pay back scholarship money if they fail to serve the required number of years after graduation.

Isaacson told Campus Progress that when she joined ROTC, she had not yet come out to herself. Now she faces the need to come up with $80,000 — all because she was honest with herself and others about who she is.

She also called the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy “the most harmful thing you can have to unit cohesion,” explaining that the fear of revealing one is gay or lesbian can put up walls between fellow soldiers. “If you can't get close to your soldiers who you need to be able to trust with your life, that's really harmful to unit cohesion and to mission readiness because you need to be able to trust everyone implicitly.”

On one level, the general policy that requires students to pay back ROTC scholarships if they do not serve after graduation makes sense — otherwise, some students would take a free ride for four years and bail, for whatever reason. When the reason for not serving is because the soldier was being true to military values, however, and it is not her or his choice to leave the service, the issue becomes a whole lot muddier.

Some colleges, like Harvard, have banned ROTC from campus because it violates the school’s nondiscrimination policy. As Rev. Irene Monroe noted here at Change.org, however, Harvard students may still serve with the MIT battalion, and are commissioned in Harvard Yard upon graduation. And the Boston Globe reported a few weeks ago that other top universities seem to be “softening” in their opposition to ROTC.

The UNC student paper, The Daily Tar Heel, however, said DADT was “blatant discrimination” and called on the university to express its opposition. The paper even suggested the university pay Isaacson’s fees.

My suggestion? Send the bill to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Photo credit: Eastern Washington University