LOCAL : Northridge Students Protest Ruling Keeping ROTC on Campus
About 40 students and a few faculty members blocked the main entrance of the administration building at Cal State Northridge for nearly three hours this morning, protesting the university president’s decision to retain ROTC military training classes.
Chanting such slogans as “ROTC go away! Racist, sexist, anti-gay!” the students said they want to see Reserve Office Training Corps programs banned from the campus because of the military’s exclusion of those who are openly homosexual.
During a March 22 meeting, CSUN faculty members voted to expel the ROTC program, which has 42 students enrolled. But that recommendation was overturned Monday by President James W. Cleary.
The administration building has six doors, according to campus police, so administrators had little difficulty finding other ways to enter the building. But one of the protest organizers, Mat Rudieck, 24, said the intent was not to prevent people from getting to work.
“Our point is to make it inconvenient for people,” he said.
The students, many of them members of the Lesbian and Gay Alliance, demanded that the college president reconsider his decision. But Cleary, who was not on campus this morning, said by telephone that his decision was circumscribed by a legal opinion from an attorney for the California State University system. That opinion found, in part, that states do not have the right to overrule federal policy.
The statewide Academic Senate is scheduled to consider the ROTC issue at its May 3 and 4 meeting in Long Beach.
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