Colleges barring military recruiters will be forced to forgo
federal funding
Gilroy – The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear: snubbing the military is perfectly acceptable, just don’t expect to see any federal dollars.
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Solomon Amendment, a 1996 law that allows the secretary of defense to deny federal funding to higher education institutions that ban military recruitment on campus.
Chief Justice John Robert wrote, “A military recruiter’s mere presence on campus does not violate a law school’s right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter’s message.”
Colleges throughout the nation have barred military recruiters from campus claiming that the federal “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy violated the school’s anti-discrimination statutes. The policy, introduced by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and created by Colin Powell, allows gays to serve in the military as long as they don’t disclose their sexual orientation through words or actions.
When the Solomon Amendment was passed, some colleges abided by the law but others, including Harvard University, stuck to the anti-military recruiters stance.
The war in Iraq and the military’s subsequent need to beef up recruitment, moved the issue to the forefront.
Locally, the decision won’t cause any ripples.
“It doesn’t effect us,” said Gavilan College Spokeswoman Jan Bernstein Chargin. “We’ve had military here for our career day pretty much every year.”
The college believes that students have the right to be exposed to all career options and to decide on their own if they want to visit the military booth, she said.
Congressman Richard Pombo R-Tracy, who co-authored the Solomon Amendment, was happy to learn of the ruling.
“I’m elated the Supreme Court has upheld the law Gerald Solomon and I worked on together years ago,” he said in a press release. “This ruling is significant. Universities that denied recruiters on their campuses were not only limiting opportunities for their own students, but in doing so did a disservice to our military men and women. They played politics and lost. If they still want to block military recruiters, they’ll have to do it without federal support.”
The congressman began working with Solomon on the issue in the mid-1990s when a group of students from California State University, Sacramento, told Pombo they were worried about losing their ROTC scholarships, said Spokeswoman Nicole Philbin.
“He believes it’s a national security issue,” she said. “If universities aren’t allowing recruiters on campus then they do that at the risk of losing their federal funding.”
