Colleges eagerly welcome war veterans

Often classroom, campus leaders
According to the Veterans Administration, about 250,000 veterans are currently using the educational benefits of the GI Bill.

Increasingly, veterans are looked to as classroom and campus leaders. Their respect for rules can rub off on students. And they can often make firsthand contributions to classroom discussions on topics that even professors can’t provide.

Veterans “offer a real rubber-meets-the-road approach that is unique in higher education,” said Jeffrey McIllwain, who teaches national security courses at San Diego State, and says veterans always stay on top of the voluminous readings he assigns. “Many professors have a lot of theory, and these students bring a wealth of experience to test that theory in really unique ways.”

Classroom discussions about, say, the surge in Iraq or the nature of the insurgency often bounce aimlessly around, McIllwain says. “Then you have a student come in and talk about how he was responsible for trying to co-opt a Sunni tribe to help the coalition,” he said. Donnelly recalls a class on nuclear weapons security where the professor grilled a student who had served in a counterintelligence unit working on that very issue. Hirsch, who served on President Bush’s Marine One helicopter crew, is often asked about the president.

Emotional gulf exists
But there are challenges, including relationships with other — often younger — students. There’s a huge gulf between the typical 19-year-old sophomore at San Diego State and a 22-year-old classmate who’s done a combat tour.

The concerns of other students “seem very trivial at times,” said Donnelly. Veterans of the Iraq war “have been to the bad side of the world. You have kids coming out of their parents’ house and they’re talking about Paris Hilton.” Still, he joined a fraternity and has made good friends.

Zshakira Carthens, who graduated from Campbell University in North Carolina last spring after an Army National Guard tour in Iraq and now works in the school’s admissions office, says the questions veterans face about the war from other students become tiresome. But she tries to answer them because it helps “people to know what the soldiers go through, because no matter how much you watch the news you could never know the full experience.”

James Wright, a former Marine and the president of Dartmouth College, who regularly visits with wounded soldiers in military hospitals, says veterans deserve the help they need to find whatever kind of college experience they’re looking for.

“To the extent they want to share their experiences, to that extent they become teachers and part of the learning environment there, they’ve got a lot to contribute,” he said. “But let’s let them contribute what they want.”

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