With the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, elite colleges now have a chance to make good on their promises and bring the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) back to campus.

For the past four decades, ROTC has been barred from some of the nation’s most prestigious schools, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. The program was first pushed off campus in the 1960s and ’70s in protest of the Vietnam war, and has been kept off campuses in protest of government policy excluding men and women who are openly homosexual from serving in the military. With Congress having now overturned that policy, ROTC’s return to these campuses has become a real possibility. “I look forward to pursuing discussions with military officials and others to achieve Harvard’s full and formal recognition of ROTC,” Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said in a statement. Columbia’s Lee Bollinger likewise celebrated the legislation: “We now have the opportunity for a new era in the relationship between universities and our military services.”