AAUP Submits Brief in Military Recruiting Case
By Gwendolyn Bradley
The AAUP in September submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court an amicus brief in the case of Donald Rumsfeld et al. vs. the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) et al. The case challenges the “Solomon Amendment,” which as now applied requires all parts of a college or university, such as a law school, to grant military recruiters equal access to the school’s career services programs or to suffer the loss of federal funds for the entire institution—even if it allows the military to recruit students on campus by other means. A number of law schools have refused to include military recruiters in their career services programs because the military discriminates against openly gay recruits and thereby violate the schools’ nondiscrimination policies.
Last year, a coalition of law faculties and faculty members joined together in the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) to challenge the implementation of the law. The coalition prevailed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The government appealed the Third Circuit’s decision, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.
The AAUP’s brief, which was written by Kathleen M. Sullivan, a constitutional law professor and former dean of Stanford Law School, argues that the amendment’s indiscriminate reach into every laboratory, library, and lecture hall on campus is unnecessary. “A law school’s exclusion of the Judge Advocate General Corps could mean the loss of funding for cancer or AIDS research elsewhere in the institution,” Sullivan says. “This puts at risk the excellence in university research that has been key to this nation’s history.”
“Academic freedom, long protected by the First Amendment, includes faculties’ right to evaluate their students based solely on merit and to require that the employers they sponsor do the same,” Sullivan says. “The Solomon Amendment intrudes upon this exercise of academic self-governance and expertise.” The brief is available in .pdf format.
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