PLU’s Army ROTC Wins 3^rd MacArthur Award in 4 Years

Members of PLU’s Army ROTC department gather for a land-navigation exercise outside PLU in January 2014. (Photo: PLU Army ROTC)

By Sandy Deneau Dunham
PLU Marketing & Communications

Pacific Lutheran University’s Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) department has won one of eight MacArthur Awards for the 2012-13 school year—its third in four years. PLU’s program also won the award for 2011-12, and for the 2009-10 academic year.

The award recognizes the eight schools, selected from among the 275 senior ROTC units nationwide, as the top programs in the country.

“We are very honored to win yet another MacArthur Award,” said Dr. Thomas W. Krise, president of Pacific Lutheran University. “This makes three wins in the last four years, which is a very rare achievement, and speaks to how deeply PLU students apply our mission of leadership, service and civic engagement.”

The awards, presented by the U.S. Army Cadet Command and the Gen. Douglas MacArthur Foundation, recognize the ideals of “duty, honor and country” as advocated by MacArthur. They are based on a combination of the achievement of the school’s commissioning mission, its cadets’ performance and standing on the Command’s national Order of Merit List and its cadet retention rate.

The eight MacArthur Awards distributed in 2013. (Photo:
Courtesy of the U.S. Army Cadet Command)