In the spring of 1969, WFB begins, "all of a sudden students and faculty discovered that ROTC was somehow intellectually unfashionable. Their discovery had nothing whatever to do with the Vietnam War, you understand, merely a coincidence." It turns out that there are non-Vietnam-related reasons to oppose ROTC-reasons that Mr. Germino is on record as having adduced for a different government program long before we were involved in Vietnam, having to do with "extramural control" and the fact that "the courses are designed for recruitment and training for a single employer"-i.e., they are not academic in the strict sense of the word. Mr. Bierman adds that "I personally have, for example, fought not a very successful battle ... trying to remove credit for physical education at my college, precisely for the reason that you mention, in that I don't think it's an academic subject either." But more important to him is the question "whether one believes that the university should be an agent or an arm of whatever institution pays the bill. Or whether you think that it should in fact try to fight for a certain kind of autonomy."