No prohibition against U.S. veterans

Andrew Theen’s article “Princeton Trails Columbia in Welcoming Vets to Ivy League” in Bloomberg News on Feb. 15 brought to mind Rudyard Kipling’s famous ballad “Tommy,” the last stanza of which ends with:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”

But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool, you bet that Tommy sees!

Commenting on Princeton’s remarkably low enrollment of veterans relative to other Ivy League colleges, Theen quotes a University spokesman as responding: “[Princeton] has no prohibition against veterans and we encourage and consider their applications like all others.”

Now it is easy in conversations like that to lapse inadvertently into infelicitous phrasing, so let us not dwell on it. The fundamental question raised by Mr. Theen’s article is this: What, affirmatively, do universities do to reach out to our veterans — especially combat veterans — to give them a leg up in finding their way back to a productive civilian life?

It is a question that ought to concern Princeton’s Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity, which has just been established by President Tilghman to find “ways to enhance the diversity of Princeton’s faculty, graduate student body and senior administration.” The committee might throw in undergraduate admissions as well.

To academics, “diversity” all too often means that people who may have grown up in the same socioeconomic strata, attended the same public or private high schools and have their eyes on the same career in, say, finance, business or law — or perform the same tasks at a university — have different gender, color of skin or ethnicity.

Fair enough. Such a mix probably can bring some diversity of views to their tasks. But just imagine what dramatically different perspectives might be added by someone who has spent a few years in a platoon with high racial, ethnic and economic diversity — in an institution that really knows how to forge harmony from that diversity toward a common national purpose.

Imagine what can be contributed by someone with notions of honor, solidarity and selfless service rarely encountered in the civilian world.

Imagine what insight might be had from someone who has had to work with people of a foreign culture, often under trying conditions.

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And imagine what distinct moral perspectives could be offered in a seminar on ethics, on the University’s discipline committee or in a dean’s office by someone who may have had to make profoundly troublesome ethical choices under fire, in split seconds.

I should not be too hard on Princeton, though. It is now commonplace that the head of the human resource department in business corporations presents annual updates to the boards of directors on the company’s diversity programs. I very much doubt that many of them include veterans among the “preferred” categories on which they report.

Indeed, only in the fall of 2011 — a decade after the war in Afghanistan began — did Congress bestir itself to pass, and President Obama sign into law, federal subsidies specifically aimed at encouraging the private sector to hire veterans after disturbing reports of unusually high unemployment rates among young veterans were published. One must ask why private employers needed this tax-financed bribe.

In an op-ed piece published in The Washington Post on Aug. 1, 2005, I wrote, “When our son, then a recent Princeton graduate, decided to join the Marine Corps in 2001, I advised him thus: ‘Do what you must, but be advised that, flourishing rhetoric notwithstanding, this nation will never truly honor your service.’ ”

James Taranto, member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, promptly declared in his column that I had been disrespectful to my son. I do not think so, nor does my son. I merely told him something about his country. It was roughly the same message Rudyard Kipling conveyed in his ballad over a century ago.

Uwe Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy and a professor in the Wilson School. He can be reached at reinhard@princeton.edu.