Hippies Make the Best Bureaucrats: The Realities of Recruiting at UCSC

Counter-Recruitment is one of the best tools of the anti-war movement. Around the country, activists are engaging in providing alternative information to potential recruits, and engaging in protests and civil disobedience to stop recruitment.

At UCSC, military recruiters only come around during the schools’ two annual career fairs. At the past two, students have prevented recruitment: last spring by surrounding the fair en masse and demanding that the recruiters leave and this fall by forming a wall of queer kissing to block access to recruiters. Recruiters will be back on campus on April 11 and students are planning an action to oppose them. Look to the right to read the letter that SAW delivered to the administration about the April 11th career fair.

The 1996 Solomon Amendment forces schools to allow military recruiters the same opportunities that they allow other employers, under penalty of withdrawal of federal funds. Recently, the Amendment was reviewed by the Supreme Court. A group of law schools argued that the military is discriminatory because of their anti-queer policy and that being forced to publicize for recruiters violated their free speech. Campus anti-war activists had been holding their breaths and playing nice with administration in hopes that the Solomon Amendment would be overturned and that recruiters could be barred from campus. But in the decision that was released March 6th, the judges voted unanimously to reject the law schools’ case.

For the past two actions opposing ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ has been the focus. Activists were enforcing the school’s anti-discrimination policy by not allowing recruiters who discriminated against homosexuals to recruit. Many student were unconvinced by this argument. Nondiscrimination was a strategic argument, in part to fall in line with the case against the Solomon Amendment. Nondiscrimination was mainstream debate but it didn’t really express why we were opposed to military recruitment on campus.

Now that there is no legal way to ban military recruiters from campus, the movement needs to find a more complete and powerful way to frame the anti-recruitment debate. We need to connect recruitment to war, and point out the contradictions of war, which reveal its implicit racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and imperialism.

Many high school students are forced into the military because there are no other economic options for them (the economic draft). A powerful argument against recruitment at the high school level is that schools have a responsibility to protect their students from the lies of recruiters and the dangers of the military. But at UCSC no one is being forced or coerced into the military. College graduates have the tools to get alternative jobs with adequate salaries. People with a degree who join the armed forces are hired to be administrators, doctors, lawyers, officers, and public relations people. These are jobs with little to no risk and much higher salaries and benefits than soldiers. They are the professional bureaucrats who order the soldiers onto the front lines. They are not just cogs in the machine. Because they have the privilege to choose to work for military, they are responsible for the wars they help create.

Because recruitment is different at UCSC than at high school campuses, the military recruitment debate needs to be different. We need to acknowledge the realities of recruitment at UCSC and look critically at the University system itself. An honest anti-recruitment movement must include a critique of the University’s role in our society, of creating and reproducing privilege. Saying no to military recruiting at UCSC is rejecting the idea that a person with a college degree is somehow worth more than a person without one. It is rejecting the unjust economic system which war relies on, which forces many poor high school students into the military while middle-class college graduates control their lives.

The military recruiters will be back on campus on April 11th at the Last Chance Job and Internship Fair. I’ll be there to prevent them from recruiting UCSC students to be their bureaucrats. Because choosing to create war shouldn’t be an option.