Years of service
In 1918, Syracuse University freshman William Tolley received 15 credits at SU through the Student Army Training Corps program, which provided veterans with college credits for their military education.
Fast forward to 1944, when Tolley was the chancellor of the university and a member of a presidential committee that formed the basis of the GI Bill, which supported about 2.3 million student veterans between 1945 and 1950 upon their return from duty in World War II.
Tolley continued the university’s dedication to veteran affairs when he announced the “uniform admissions program,” which granted all military personnel admission to SU. The university admitted 9,464 veterans at the start of the spring 1946 semester, nearly doubling the size of the student body overnight. The new students were housed in 900 Quonset huts, barracks and trailers across campus, according to university archives.
By 1950, SU had swelled from a small school of about 5,000 students to a university of 17,000.
“(The GI Bill) made education available to the masses. It changed our country,” said Patrick Jones, SU’s director of veteran enrollment practice. “It changed American universities from little schools to bigger schools, but not just the size, but the diversity of offerings and the diversity of types of students who came.”
In 2015, 70 years after the end of WWII, SU continues its historic connection to veterans through the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, which helps veterans with employment and post-service obstacles, and the Office of Veteran and Military Affairs, which focuses on ensuring the academic success of student veterans at SU, as well as other programs across the university.
People tend to remember SU’s commitment to veterans affairs as beginning in WWII due to institutional memory and icons like Rosie the Riveter, Jones said, but the university had services for World War I veterans as well that set “fertile ground” for the expansion of veteran services during WWII.
“This is kind of that untold part. We see those pictures of all those people and we think they all just came back and they came to school and they got married and they had kids and they had their cool cars in the ‘50s and it was over,” Jones said. “We provided all this support.”
The university’s role in stepping up to accommodate the educational needs of veterans ranked it first in New York state and 17th in the United States in veteran enrollment during the war.
SU created five centers to address the needs of WWII veterans between 1943 and 1947, and the first three WWII veterans to enroll at SU did so before D-Day on June 6, 1944, Jones said. These centers included a speech clinic, a veterans educational program, an evaluation center, a psychological center and a veterans advisement center, Jones said.
The university used these new centers in combination with its existing offices to assist veterans, Jones said, which included the College of Medicine, School of Speech and the physical education department.
Student veterans themselves also created centers for veterans on campus, Jones said. A modern example is the Student Veterans Organization, which informs them of campus resources and holds networking events and casual activities like barbecues for student veterans, said Charles Preuss, a veteran and junior in the School of Information Studies who is a former vice president of the organization.
It’s a plethora of different resources that pretty much are set in place for all student veterans on campus. It’s to make their transition from the military to academic life as smooth as possible.
SU is one of the better environments in the nation for student veterans, Preuss said, because the university provides one of the best support structures for them with the IVMF and the OVMA.
Being military-friendly is in the DNA of the university, Jones said, as is being a diverse campus. But he acknowledged that though SU has a rich history with veterans affairs, there have been struggles.
These struggles include protests during the Vietnam War and an opposition toward SU’s ROTC program, which was then centered in the College of Arts and Sciences, Jones said. In 1970, faculty voted to remove ROTC amid the shutdown of ROTC programs at universities across the country in light of opposition to Vietnam, but Jones said then-Chancellor John Corbally instead moved the ROTC program out of the College of Arts and Sciences and into the administration.
The administration saw the value of ROTC even as it became politicized across the country.
There have also been times in the university’s history when veterans affairs was not a priority, he added, because between wars, veterans become “invisible.” Veterans are a priority now, he said, because there are so many across the country in the wake of the war on terror.
Former Chancellor Kenneth Shaw was at the head of the university during a time when the U.S. was involved in little international conflict until 9/11. Shaw, who was chancellor from 1991 to 2004, said military personnel were likely going overseas toward the end of his tenure, rather than coming home to study at universities.
Shaw acknowledged the efforts of former Chancellor Nancy Cantor in the veterans sphere, and those of current Chancellor Kent Syverud in establishing the improvement of veterans affairs at SU as one of his primary goals as chancellor in his inauguration address.
Syverud’s most recent veteran-related initiative is the idea of the creation of a veteran-focused medical school aimed to ease the projected 22,000-doctor shortage at Veterans Administrations Hospitals across the U.S.
“I think that the university has stepped up to the obligation,” Shaw said. “… It’s a very important part of our history.”