Another letter to The Daily Princetonian, likely to go unprinted. Do I sound like a broken record? Yes. Do I care? No.

The photo below is of members of Princeton Army ROTC this morning, ambling from some ROTC training back to Forbes College. It’s all obviously a game to them: ROTC may as well be some alternative sort of NCAA sport. Somebody needs to tell these students that the sport for which they’re training is civilizational annihilation. Are they willing to play that game, or do they think they should demur? No one at Princeton seems to have the courage or honesty to raise this question directly with them, much less with their officers. I have to confess that I myself was waiting for a bus when I took this picture, and didn’t have the nerve to forget the commute, bail out on my work day, walk over to them, and initiate a conversation. We all have an excuse for inaction, but eventually the excuses have to give way to action–mine, yours, everyone’s. 

To the Editor:

It belabors the obvious to say that the United States and Israel are currently engaged in an immoral and illegal war of aggression against Iran. Less obvious is Princeton’s connection to this war: by hosting ROTC programs, Princeton is underwriting the aims of the US military, and worse still, potentially training officers for combat in the current war and any offshoots it may later have. In a more immediate sense, as the recent shooting at Old Dominion University makes clear, ROTC students and faculty at Princeton are not only making themselves targets for retaliation, but turning the University itself into one.

ROTC students should be informed that they have an option of conscientious objection from service in the war, and under the circumstances, are strongly advised to take it. I suggest consulting the resources at the Center on War and Conscience (https://centeronconscience.org/), and filing the paperwork for Conscientious Objector status as soon as possible. Don’t wait until the last minute, so that you face the prospect of criminal charges for insubordination. The time to act is now.

We can’t allow Princeton to become complicit in an evil of this magnitude. Speaking of complicity, I wonder how many people at Princeton still know who Mario Savio was; look him up if you don’t. I was one of the editors of the last (posthumously-published) academic paper that Savio wrote (Mario Savio, “Aristotelian-Euler Diagrams: An Alternative Complete Method for the Categorical Syllogism,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 39:4, Fall 1998). I can’t help thinking that in carrying on business as usual during this war, we are mutely watching the cruel, sad betrayal of Savio’s mostly unsung legacy to higher education. Princeton’s complacency in the face of the war has been truly sickening to watch. I would enjoin the institution to do better–if only I could be sure that it could.

Irfan Khawaja ‘91
Princeton, NJ