Court’s Finding of Bias Keeps FBI Recruiters Off 2 Campuses

The FBI has been barred from recruiting at two major law schools since a court ruled last fall that it systematically discriminated against Latino agents.

The deans of the law schools at the University of Michigan and Ohio State University said Tuesday that they imposed the ban because their schools’ policies prohibit employers found to discriminate from using school facilities to contact students.

U. S. District Court Judge Lucius D. Bunton ruled last September that the FBI had denied Latino agents promotions and given them the least rewarding and most hazardous assignments. The bureau disputed the findings and has begun a program to recruit more minority agents.

“If it was one case of (discrimination), that’s one thing, but this was a finding of a de facto policy,” said Lee Bollinger, dean of the University of Michigan law school. He said he barred FBI recruiters for one year after several student groups complained.

“It was deeply offensive to our own students to assist that organization in hiring,” Bollinger added.

Milt Ahlerich, the bureau’s assistant director for congressional and public affairs, said FBI Director William S. Sessions had written Bollinger asking that the policy be reversed. “The director stated in straightforward terms that there is not and will not be discrimination in the bureau’s hiring practices,” Ahlerich said.

The Michigan action “has inhibited and stifled the bureau’s ability to strengthen itself,” Ahlerich said. “It is an important law school, no question about it.”

At the university, the Black Law Students Alliance, the Hispanic Law Students Assn., the National Lawyers Guild and other student groups last fall circulated a petition protesting the FBI recruitment. It cited black agent Donald Rachon’s lawsuit alleging that he had been subjected to racial harassment in the bureau’s Chicago and Omaha offices.

Bunton made his ruling a few weeks later, in a class action lawsuit filed by agent Bernardo Perez and about three-fourths of the bureau’s other Latino agents. The court’s decision prompted Bollinger to impose the ban.

Francis X. Beytagh, dean of the Ohio State University College of Law, said the school barred FBI recruiters from the campus but allowed the agency to distribute literature. He said the ban was imposed partly because of the court ruling, but also because the bureau did not satisfy another aspect of the school’s equal-opportunity policy: the part that protects homosexual applicants from discrimination.

Some other leading law schools, including Harvard University’s, have barred FBI recruiters in the past on the grounds of discrimination against homosexuals.