Of all the graduates receiving their diplomas this season, the one we salute this morning is Bret Woellner. He is the Columbia University graduate student who was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army yesterday in the first joint commissioning ceremony ever held at the White House for graduates of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. All of the ROTC graduates are men and women who made extraordinary sacrifices as students. But Mr. Woellner was among a select group who made a double sacrifice, because Columbia, like several other universities who had graduates at the White House yesterday, bans ROTC from campus. So Mr. Woellner had to travel to Fordham to do his military studies.

This was not lost on President Bush, who, in exceptionally eloquent remarks that we reprint on the adjacent page, who declared the commissioning ceremony a “solemn moment” for our country. He noted that many of those about to become officers were still in high school when terrorists attacked on September 11, 2001. “Yet, some of you understood that the cause of freedom would soon depend on your generation’s willingness to step forward to defend it,” the president said. “And when it came time to be counted, each of you volunteered, knowing full well the risks involved during a time of war.”

Mr. Bush spoke of how the ROTC cadets “have been taught a way of life that elevates service above self” and how they have “learned that honor is not just a word” but “a sacred inheritance to be preserved and handed down.” Then he spoke a formulation that we learned when we were in the Army and that is one of the great truths of life. “You have learned,” the president said, “that courage is not the absence of fear. It is the ability to do the right thing in spite of your fears.” He spoke of how an ROTC scholarship helped pay for the college education of most of the cadets. “The American people provide these funds willingly,” he said. “In return they ask one thing: when their sons and daughters are put in harm’s way, they will be led by officers of character and integrity.”

The president spoke of how the cadets chose a path that is not easy. “When your roommates slept in, you got up at dawn for a three-mile run. While others spread out on the grass on a sunny day, you marched in formation. And when your friends called it a night and headed out to the town, you stayed back to shine your shoes and iron your uniform in preparation for the next day’s inspection.” And then the president spoke of the extra effort individuals that some cadets, like Bret Woellner at Columbia, had to make because of the anti-ROTC prejudice on their campuses. He spoke of their “split existence, where your life as a cadet or midshipman is invisible to most of your fellow students.”

“Every American citizen is entitled to his or her opinion about our military,” the president said. “But surely the concept of diversity is large enough to embrace one of the most diverse institutions in American life. It should not be hard for our great schools of learning to find room to honor the service of men and women who are standing up to defend the freedoms that make the work of our universities possible.”

And then came the pointed words: “To the cadets and midshipmen who are graduating from a college or university that believes ROTC is not worthy of a place on campus, here is my message: Your university may not honor your military service, but the United States of America does. And in this, the people’s house, we will always make a place for those who wear the uniform of our country.”

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There is going to come a time when Columbia and the other institutions that have spurned ROTC even after the outbreak of a world war that began with an attack on the heart of New York City are going to look back on these times with a twinge of the emotion that Shakespeare’s Henry V, on the eve of Agincourt, put so famously when he spoke of how “gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accursed that they were not here.” And a generation or so hence the shame of Columbia will be lessened, its honor redeemed by the fact that Lieutenant Woellner made his choice, got up early, did his drills, learned to lead, and, in the East Room of the White House, stepped forward to accept a commission from the Congress in a time of war.