Training officers in university benefits all

I do not intend to inflame a member of the facul ty, but I find Professor Robert Brophy's alarm about ROTC (Daily Forty-Niner, Oct. 3) misguided.

As a product of the ROTC system and as one who could only afford college because of the scholarships for which I competed - and, therefore, a high-pri ced prostitute in the professor's words - I sense that Brophy is unfamiliar with the value system of an ROTC- source officer. An ROTC officer cannot graduate from college by taking only the military or science courses offered by those departments.

Personally, I would highly recommend the maintenance of the ROTC recruitment of officers into an otherwise professionalized armed forces of the United States. It may have been peculiar to my service, but I found the ROTC-source officers far more sensit ive than military academy graduates to issues of civilian supremacy, the Nuremberg principles, and the existence of a civil society beyond the boundaries of the base. (As I recall, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was a Naval Academy Graduate.)

"Lo ckstep, blind obedience to orders" does not come to mind when I recall the ROTC-source officers I served with and have subsequently known. Blind, unthinking opposition to conservative institutions, however, is sometimes known of university faculty mem bers.

Derk Bruins, lecturer
Political science department