Supreme Court to Weigh Ban on Recruiters

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the nation's colleges and universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without losing federal funding.

The case, to be heard in the fall, poses a clash between government money and free speech.

A coalition of law schools last year won an appellate court ruling that said their right to free speech included the right to refuse to associate with military recruiters. The law schools argued that the Pentagon's policies on gays and lesbians in the military were discriminatory.

If that ruling is allowed to stand, all colleges and universities would have that right.

But the justices voted to take up the Pentagon's claim that because colleges and universities accepted federal funds, they had an obligation to give the military the same right to recruit on campus as other employers.

"Effective recruitment is essential to an all-volunteer military, particularly in a time of war," the government's lawyers said. The Defense Department wants to recruit law school graduates to serve as lawyers or judges in the military.

Congress adopted the Pentagon's view in a spending provision, known as the Solomon amendment for its chief sponsor, then-Rep. Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.), that was first attached to a defense authorization bill in 1994 and has been revised several times since. It allows the government to cut off money to colleges and universities that bar Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs from campus or that deny military recruiters "equal access" to students on the same basis as other employers.

Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy), a cosponsor of the amendment, said lawmakers wanted to "send a message over the wall of the ivory tower of higher education" that their "starry-eyed idealism comes with a price. If they are too good -- or too righteous -- to treat our nation's military with the respect it deserves, then they may also be too good to receive the generous level of taxpayer dollars presently enjoyed by many institutions of higher education in America."

Two years ago, a coalition of 31 law schools and law school faculties -- including Georgetown, Stanford and New York universities -- challenged the law as unconstitutional. They noted that since 1990, most of the nation's law schools had adopted a strict policy of nondiscrimination that said, among other things, that on-campus facilities would not be available to employers who "discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, handicap or disability, age or sexual orientation."