ROTC head expands program, encourages student leaders

The Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) hosted at UConn is booming.

“Our mission last year was to graduate 13 cadets,” says Lt. Col. Christine Harvey, head of the Department of Military Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“We graduated 19. Now it’s 18, then it will be 20 next year, and 21 in 2011. We’ll surpass all the numbers.”

The department offers a range of courses that all ROTC cadets must take in order to graduate. The courses are also open to the general student population as electives.

When Harvey arrived at UConn in 2006, there were 36 students under “contract,” a term the Army uses to describe students who have signed paperwork committing them to four years of active duty after they graduate from college. At the start of this academic year, the number had increased to more than 70.

Most contracted students receive full scholarships for tuition and fees, paid by the federal government to the University. The total has doubled since Harvey arrived, to more than $950,000 this year.

In addition, students from 10 other colleges in Connecticut attend ROTC programming at UConn, the only university in the state to offer it.

Harvey, who went through an ROTC program herself at the State University of New York at Cortland, has worked hard to get the program where it is.

She also ran into a bit of luck: just as she was arriving, the Army lifted a cap on the number of scholarships programs could offer. That cap had hurt the efforts of her predecessor, Lt. Col. Paul Veilleux, to expand the program. But that wasn’t the only problem.

“When I got here in 2006, I was stunned by how many students I met that didn’t know there was an ROTC presence here,” Harvey says.

She decided to address the problem from the academic side first.

“There was a disconnect in the curriculum,” she says, “especially between the sophomore and junior years. The students were not ready to progress to the leadership course. And the quality of the training had to be improved.”

The training is rigorous. Contracted students (73 of the 101 currently enrolled) must be in the training room by 6 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for workouts, to prepare for the five-week course at Ft. Lewis, Wash., they’ll attend during the summer after their junior year.

The course can make or break their careers. All cadets in the country — more than 4,400 attended last summer – are assessed during the activity, and their scores determine whether they are given active duty status.