Yet Another Year With Few Veterans at Selective Colleges

I’ll start with a sledgehammer for this annual report on the tiny number of undergraduate veterans at the self-proclaimed top colleges in the nation, in the world. I have shredded drafts in reasonable tones. For 17 years, nothing has worked to persuade these colleges, except Syracuse and Columbia Universities, to look out for the three million other people’s children that we, the people, have sent to war. I mean an effort equal to the college’s standing and endowment.

More than 10 years of writing this annual report have shown me patterns. Again this year, I wrote weeks of drafts trying to take a constructive, mature tone to describe this tragic, tragic, ridiculous, shameful situation. Again, a few days before the deadline, with Inside Higher Ed wondering if I am here at all, I erupt in anger. A rational tone is irresponsible.

This year, I’ll try a new word, “sledgehammer,” to demand that selective colleges, starting with my Williams and Yale, stop making excuses. Fill the dormitories with the other people’s children we have sent to war.

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I have rational context for my anger. About two million of the three million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have a disability. According to the Brown (51 undergraduate veterans) Cost of Wars Project, 7,057 U.S. service members have died in post–Sept. 11 war operations. Brown also reports 30,177 deaths by suicide among U.S. service members and veterans of post–Sept. 11 wars. The number of homeless veterans is unstable—say, 33,000. We, the people, sent these men and women on this path to war and home. These wars began 20 years ago.

What’s 189?

The total number of undergraduate veterans this fall at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Williams and Amherst. Compare those five most, most highly selective colleges to Bunker Hill Community College, where I worked with veterans for many years. Bunker Hill has 246 veterans this fall.

Again: Bunker Hill Community College has 246 veterans this fall. Williams has 12.

My unanswered, again, question: How could the self-proclaimed top colleges in the nation, in the world, educate graduates who can solve problems without sending other people’s children to war? I keep asking college presidents. None will reply on this question.

The colleges that respond to this survey (not all of them do—see the table below) focus on the enrollment questions, not my questions about what graduates have learned. “Does anything in the educations these eminent institutions provide consider the effects on the world of endless wars?”

A bunch of misguided Yale alumni unable to evaluate primary sources invaded Iraq on false evidence. Again, from the Brown Costs of War project, that invasion was 20 years and $8 trillion ago. Skip this column. Read the Brown link. How did this happen in a nation with so many educated leaders?

The deficiencies in these most highly selective educations are piling up. It’s a good time to reflect on the outcomes in U.S. higher education over at least the past 75 years.

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An invasion of Iraq based on what evidence? Global warming—that we can keep pumping gasoline forever with no consequence. The destruction of the public education systems that sent most of the white baby boomers to these most highly selective colleges. Over 17 years on the undergraduate veterans’ issue, I cannot stir any much reflection by classmates, alumni, presidents or trustees of my platinum-spoon colleges, Williams and Yale.

Among my contemporaries at my schools and elsewhere, my veterans’ work is seen as a joke, as an embarrassment, as a nuisance, as tasks by someone who can’t get a real job in private equity or hedge funds. I am the only one of my peers I know who has met Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. I know one Gold Star family. That’s more than anyone I know from my schools.

This is no matter how many times I describe trying (and failing) to help an Iraq-wounded Marine sobbing in my windowless basement office at Bunker Hill Community College. Two more of his buddies from his unit and Iraq and from Walter Reed had died by suicide. This veteran, whom we can’t find now, was 30 years old. Twenty of his buddies had died by suicide. He had lost count of how many had tried to harm themselves. At 30, how many of us knew 20 friends who had died by suicide, by any cause?

More perspective: the colleges surveyed have a total undergraduate enrollment of about 200,000. Total undergraduate veterans these colleges reported this fall? Again, I lose reasonable tones. We the people send three million other people’s children to war; two million are wounded, 7,057 died and 30,177 later died by suicide. Students, faculty, trustees, presidents who know they are among the most privileged in the world can say with straight faces that making room for a few dozen, if any, veterans is sufficient?

I’ll apply the writing credo “Show, don’t tell.” Consider Doonesbury from last summer. Iraq and Afghanistan may be long gone from the news. Not for the veterans. The young man is Toggle, who came home from the wars in 2010 with a traumatic brain injury. Toggle was headed for community college, and Garry Trudeau wrote me to ask what veterans could expect at community college. I enrolled Toggle at Bunker Hill.

Printed with permission of Garry Trudeau

Toggle did not find his way to the selective colleges surveyed here. An emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital said late nights through dawn bring in the Toggles of the world and Vietnam veterans, too, whose memories still prevent sleep. “Most just want to talk about what they remember,” my Mass General friend told me.

Skip this column. Read this July 2023 Washington Post column by Trudeau, about the help Toggle and his buddies have a hard time finding.

Visit your Congressional delegation.

What war in Syria? “Show, don’t tell.”

Click here and read about the horrifying wounds to U.S. troops firing thousands of artillery rounds, now, into Syria. Who authorized this?

The story notes that the U.S. troops in Syria only fire the artillery. The troops do not see the explosions, the damage, the death. Imagining the damage haunts these men and women, these troops.

Visit your congressional delegation.

The biggest sledgehammer, “Show, don’t tell,” about thinking before sending other people’s children to war, is the 2013 New York Times story of President Obama and Army Ranger Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg, a soldier severely wounded in Afghanistan. Obama met the healthy Remsburg in 2009 at the 65th anniversary of D-Day at Omaha Beach. Later, Obama was visiting the wounded troops at the National Naval Medical Center. Obama saw on the wall a photo of himself and Remsburg at Omaha Beach. Remsburg was the wounded soldier in the room Obama was visiting.

The third photo is Obama visiting Remsburg, who was using a walker, at home in Phoenix.

“The third time was two weeks ago (2013) in a private visit in Phoenix, where Sergeant Remsburg did something that neither Mr. Obama nor military doctors would once have predicted: he stood up and saluted his commander in chief.

“There was more. Grasping his walker, ‘Cory took a step, then another, and then another,’ Mr. Obama said later, ‘all the way across the room.’”

Back to the sledgehammer, to a hope from this obscure column. Consider Sergeant Remsburg’s wounds, his life since he was a healthy young man greeting President Obama on Omaha Beach. We, the people, sent Sergeant Remsburg to Afghanistan. What did Cory Remsburg’s war solve that was worth these injuries? Are these campuses with so few veterans considering Cory Remsburg or those like him?

Back to the beginning, my failing question: How could the self-proclaimed top colleges in the nation, in the world, educate citizens who can solve problems without sending other people’s children to war?

	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Amherst College	8	5	8	5	5	9	13	16	14	11	9
Bowdoin College										5	6
Brown U	12	11	10	12	17	17	21	26	36	41	51
Bryn Mawr College	0	0	0	0	4	0	2	0	0	2	0
California Inst. of Tech.							0
Carleton College	0	0	0	3	0					0	0
Columbia U School of General Studies	n/a	360	408	375	422	443	477	441	430	313	277
Colorado College				3		0	0	0	0	0
Cornell U	1			12	24	27	30	62	82	75	72
Dartmouth College	14		17	23	25	36	34	33	26	20	11
Duke U	1	1	2	0	1	2	7	2	2	3	3
Georgetown U	25	74	58	65	64	41	42	26	13	25
Harvard U		4		3	6	8	17	24	49	59	71
Johns Hopkins U	23	19	30	17	18	2	5		2	3	5
Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.	2	0	1	4	10	11	12	11	9	6	8
Middlebury College						0
Mount Holyoke College	0	2	4	2		0	0	0	1	0	0
Northwestern U	14	19	11	15	15	51	6
Oberlin College	0			0	0
Pomona College	1	1	1	3	5	6	3	4	5	7	6
Princeton U	1	1	1	1	5	12	18	23	22	40	58
Rice U	1	0	0	0	0	0		1	1	1
Smith College	0	0	1	2	3	2	1	0	1	0	11
Stanford U		10	16	21	23	30	26	37	19
Swarthmore College	0			0				2
Syracuse U								124	135	152	169
Trinity College		10	4	4	0			0	3	9
U of Chicago							15	33	55	76	86
U of Pennsylvania	35	35			14	15	15	19			5
University of Rochester										56
Vanderbilt U				1			6	3	2	8	7
Vassar College			30	32		34	32	29	30	22	21
Washington U in St. Louis	20	21	13	12	6	10	32	4	4	2	2
Wellesley College	2	2	1	0	2			1	1
Wesleyan U	2	11	22	30	38	39	35	29	26	24	22
Williams College	0	0	1	3	5	5	5	4	7	13	12
Yale U	2	3	4	11	12	10	15	16	25	33	40
Total	180	596	643	641	724	830	884	946	1000	1006	952