Reversing a
decision made last year, Harvard Law School will fully
cooperate with Pentagon recruiters this fall as it awaits a
U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of
a law requiring schools to open their doors to the military.
The dispute concerns a decade-old law called the
Solomon Amendment that requires campuses to offer full
recruiting access to the Pentagon or risk losing
federal grants. Before it was enforced, numerous law schools
denied the military formal recruiting access,
saying the government's "don't ask, don't tell"
policy regarding gays in the military violates the
schools' nondiscrimination guidelines for recruiters.
Last year the Third U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals sided with law schools that had sued to
overturn the law on free speech grounds.
After that decision, most schools said they
would continue to abide by the law pending a final
ruling from the Supreme Court, which will hear the
case in December. Harvard, however, reverted to its old
policy and did not offer formal recruiting cooperation
last spring.
But in an e-mail sent to students late Tuesday,
Dean Elena Kagan said the Pentagon had told Harvard it
would enforce the law despite the third circuit court
ruling, potentially costing the university--and
especially its research-intensive medical and
public-health schools--hundreds of millions of
dollars. Overall, about 15% of the university's budget comes
from the government.
A group of Harvard faculty planned to file a
brief Wednesday to the Supreme Court urging that the
law be overturned, as did a separate consortium of law schools.
Last week, three law schools, including New York
Law School, were listed in the federal register as
ineligible for federal funds for denying full
cooperation to military recruiters, according to Kent
Greenfield, a Boston College law professor active in
the case opposing the law. But all three were
"stand-alone" law schools that were not putting other
parts of their universities at risk of losing federal money.
Yale Law School also has reinstated its policy
denying formal access to military recruiters, but it
is protected by a separate injunction from a federal
judge that prevents the Pentagon from enforcing the policy there.
HLS Lambda, a group representing gay students at
Harvard, posted a statement on its Web site saying the
group wished the university had more actively opposed
the law but applauded Kagan for barring recruiters last
November. The group said the Pentagon's policy on gays and
the law threatening to deny universities funding
"serve neither its interests nor the country's as a
whole." (AP)
