This weekend, as most of us are heading home for Thanksgiving, Joy Joung’11 will be heading into the woods. She’ll have a protractor, a map, a compass, and a flashlight.

Joung is currently the only Brown student enrolled in the University’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, and this weekend is her first weekend field training.

Three days a week, she wakes before dawn, borrows her roommate’s car and drives the fifteen minutes over to Providence College for physical training—a combination of running, push-ups, sit-ups for an hour. “It is the army,” she laughs. “So there is some yelling involved.” She also has a military-science lab, field training over extended weekends and, back at Brown, five academic courses and ice hockey practice for five hours a day.

Joung is one of a handful of Brown students in recent years to take on a controversial commitment. As the discussion buzzes on campus, the debate often centers around the big-picture context in which ROTC occurs: war, peace, and the university’s role in society. Lost in the chatter surrounding Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the military-industrial-complex, however, are individuals like Juong and Adam Swartzbaugh ’09, for whom the issue is anything but abstract. For Swartzbaugh, ROTC is “not about guns and tactics and marching around.” Rather, it’s a mode of study like any other; “it teaches the skills we need to apply the knowledge we freely explore here.”

As a university that values openness of our curriculum, is there a place in our studies for military science? Or, as some would argue, is ROTC a necessarily political, non-academic extracurricular? Fundamentally, these questions drive at the present status of ROTC in practice at Brown. Because the thing about the ROTC debate is that it’s not really about ROTC—or rather, it’s about much more than ROTC.

Students like Juong and Swartzbaugh have committed themselves to three years of active duty and five years in the Army Reserves in exchange for substantial scholarship. In the past three years, the army has nearly tripled the amount of funding it puts into these scholarships, which any student entering the third-year must accept with commission.

However, according to those close to the program, significant institutional obstacles—as well as a general lack of information about the program—still stymie student involvement.

To Swartzbaugh, the gulf between Brown’s culture and that of ROTC was huge: “It’s two totally different worlds,” he recalls. “I felt like I was running across a suspension bridge of sorts. I felt like I was dividing myself in two different pieces.”

According to a recent Herald poll, Brown students are divided as well: 41.3 percent of those polled said that they’d support the reinstatement of ROTC, while 24.9 percent said they’d oppose it, and 33.8 percent said they didn’t know.

Presently, Brown students must enroll in Providence College ROTC and receive no administrative support in the way of credit for full-time courses or transport services back and forth.

Lieutenant Commander Matthew McKinley, who leads the program, tells Post- that all of the other colleges that participate in PC’s Providence Battalion—which has 86 participants from seven local schools—offer their students some kind of credit. McKinley—who himself came up through ROTC while at the University of Maine and completed a tour in Iraq before coming to PC just after a year ago—Brown, however, does not, and, according to McKinley, would require a review of PC’s Military Science curriculum before it would be willing to. For McKinley, who has been faced with personnel cuts and has no trouble filling a battalion with students from other schools, undertaking such a review is simply not worth the time and energy. “There’s no compelling reason to extend so much effort over there, at least right now,” he says. “While I want Brown to be a more full participant, I’ve got schools that are running with me.”

According to Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, the University is interested in working with McKinley to strengthen the relationship between Brown and the Battalion. “We’ve only recently begun to explore the different types of leadership opportunities available on campus.” “The issue is how to appropriately recognize students for their involvement in [such] activities.”

For his part, McKinley says he “doesn’t sense any kind of ulterior motive or hidden agenda on the part of Brown.” Both Swartzbaugh and Joung say that they’ve never experienced even a trace of hostility from their peers or professors. Yet, the debate remains centered around the politics rather than the practice. Even if incorporating military science into Brown’s undergraduate liberal arts curriculum were easily feasible, there is still some widespread resentment of university complicity. Bill Simmons, who teaches “Transformation of the Research University,” says. “I’m questioning why we want to bring the university into the orbit of how we train people for this,” he says. “It’s not the university’s job to be patriotic. It’s the university’s job to help students figure through the world’s problems.”

Swartzbaugh, however, disagrees: “It’s about creating strategies for getting things done. Whether you want to save the whales or start your own business, that’s valuable.” So how do we move past this background talk about purpose? The question is about whether this program has value for one or both institutions, and more specifically, whether the option is even on the table. How do we balance the liberal arts with liberal politics? Divorcing these definitions is at the core of changing the campus discourse around ROTC—until then, an army of one is more literal than some would like.