News that Columbia’s trustees are going to get involved in – or at least consider – the possibility of bringing back reserve officers training is a welcome development. It was reported yesterday by our Jacob Gershman, who spoke with Columbia’s chairman, David Stern, in the wake of the stunning decision of the president of the university, Lee Bollinger, to vote against the military when the issue came up in the university senate. Mr. Bollinger’s vote brought, among other reactions, a devastating rebuke in the Wall Street Journal. It issued an editorial contrasting Columbia University with University of Missouri-Columbia, whence an ROTC graduate was recently killed in action in Iraq. It also published an op-ed article raising the possibility that Columbia University here could run afoul of a law that allows the federal government to withhold contracts and grants from universities that don’t permit ROTC programs on their campuses.

The law, named after the late Gerald Solomon, a New York Republican, doesn’t yet come into play in respect of Columbia, because the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps is not, at least at the moment, seeking to set up a unit at Morningside Heights. This is what we’re told by the Pentagon. Columbia students who want to train for a commission in the military have to schlep to one of the patriotic hotspots in the city, Fordham University in the Bronx or Manhattan College in Riverdale. Columbia itself isn’t such an unpatriotic place; a recent poll found that 65% of students are in favor of bringing back ROTC, a backdrop against which the shame of Mr. Bollinger’s lack of support for ROTC in the midst of a desperate war is thrown into particularly sharp relief.

Much is being made of the notion that this doesn’t relate to the war but to policy governing gays in the military, a claim Mr. Bollinger tried again to advance in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. Our sense of the situation is that if people really believed this was the issue, Mr. Bollinger would get more respect. Every time we walk through Union Station in Washington we raise a salute to the statue of A. Philip Randolph. It was Mr. Randolph who in June 1948 founded the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, which urged blacks and whites to resist the draft. A month later, President Truman signed an executive order mandating racial equality in the military. For decades to come, people will tremble with admiration as they tell their children about A. Philip Randolph.

But whichever view one takes on the question of homosexuality and the military and whether the issue is similar to racial bigotry, ROTC was ejected from the Columbia campus long ago for reasons that have nothing to do with the excuse Mr. Bollinger is citing. Until that is rectified, the university’s high-minded claims will ring hollow. Michael Adler, a business school professor who has guided Columbia’s cadets in their campaign for ROTC, got a sense of the sentiment inside Schermerhorn Hall during the university senate’s meeting. He recalls how after the vote against ROTC, a group came out of the room and passed him: “One of the youngsters turned and said, ‘The baby killers lost.'”

Frederic Cook, a member of the Defense Business Board, which advises the Pentagon, told Mr. Gershman that concern for gays in the military is often “just an excuse. If it wasn’t that, it would be something else.” How surprising would it be if the government were to abolish “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and Mr. Bollinger were to respond by declaring that the university could not consent to working with a military that had flouted international law? The fact is that many of those most committed to pressing the government to change its policy toward gays in the military are those asking that Columbia open its doors to ROTC.

Yesterday, Mr. Bollinger spoke to Columbia’s class of 2005 and admonished students about wearing ideological blinders. “We do not operate on the assumption that there are two neatly contrasting sides in every debate. Our focus, instead, is one examining an issue – any issue – in its full complexity,” he said. Mr. Bollinger does not live up to his ideal when he communicates to Columbia’s cadets that they are not welcome to train on campus. The right reaction from the Pentagon is to move expeditiously to seek an ROTC unit at Columbia and to enforce the Solomon amendment. Meantime all eyes will be on the trustees to see whether they will tolerate Mr. Bollinger’s posturing as they consider the university’s obligations during a desperate war in which tens of thousands of young Americans are putting their lives on the line.