It is fitting to begin our empirical sojourn with the most politicized dimension of the relationship between the military and the university: the historical movement against ROTC and the subsequent efforts to bring it back from institutions that drove it away in the 1960s. Our focus is the Ivy League in general and Columbia University in particular. The reasons for this focus are threefold. First, Columbia and the Ivies offer the most prominent examples of the campus war truces that led to the abolition or abandonment of ROTC in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As we will see, there is some confusion as to the actual motives that lay behind this process, so the best way to express what happened has been offered by Columbia sociologist Allan Silver, who says that such universities “effectively barred” ROTC at the time. Second, the Ivies have emerged as a key home front for what we could call the “return of the soldier” to higher education in terms of both physical and mental presence. Columbia is a veritable ground zero for this movement. Third, because of their elite and self-proclaimed status as America’s most prestigious schools of preparing future leaders, Ivy institutions represent the most interesting and telling examples of the abandonment of the military by the nation’s elites – the “absent without leave” (AWOL) phenomenon that has occasioned the justifiable consternation of citizens committed to a common civic order.