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Written by: Barbara Lauren
Published: 09/28/2005 Harvard Law School to Cooperate with Military Recruiters this Fall
Dean Elena Kagan announced that Harvard Law School will actively cooperate with military recruiters this fall. In an e-mail to students and faculty, the Harvard Crimson reported, Kagan wrote that the Pentagon had notified the University this summer that, under the Solomon Amendment, it would withhold most federal grants to Harvard unless the career services office at the Law School provided the same access to military recruiters as to other job recruiters.
Harvard receives more than $400 million per year in federal grants – amounting to 15% of its total budget, according to the Crimson.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments late this fall on the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment. The case is Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), a coalition of law schools challenging that law. The Harvard Law School is not a member of FAIR, but will be filing its own friend-of-the-court brief as part of the FAIR case. Harvard has not filed a separate lawsuit challenging the Solomon Amendment.
In the first version of the law, passed in 1994, the Solomon Amendment penalized only the particular entity within a university which was non-compliant with the Solomon Amendment. As a consequence, according to Jeffrey Toobin, writing in The New Yorker, the NYU Law School gave up $75,000 in federal funds, under the law as it operated at that time. Later, however, when the Solomon Amendment was changed, so that many types of federal funding for the entire university would be at risk if any one “sub-element” refused to comply with Solomon, NYU instructed its law school to provide access to military recruiters. Otherwise, according to Toobin, the University would have lost $130 million, mostly for medical research.
The Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, according to Harvard and the FAIR law schools, contravenes law school policy under the non-discrimination standards of the Association of American Law Schools – standards which require law schools to withhold access to law school career offices, to employers which discriminate on various grounds, including sexual orientation. The law schools contend that the Solomon Amendment requires them to express a message which is incompatible with their educational objectives, and therefore violates the law schools’ free-speech rights. A federal appeals court for the Third Circuit (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) ruled in favor of the law schools, but enforcement of that ruling affecting those jurisdictions has been stayed pending the forthcoming decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Solomon Amendment thus remains the law of the land, in all states.
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