Law Schools Bow to Pentagon on Recruiters

Law schools at USC and several other universities are being forced to give military recruiters greater access to their students or risk the loss to their campuses of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds.

The law schools are among the final holdouts in a long struggle between the military and many of the nation’s universities over the Defense Department’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules about gays, which conflict with nondiscrimination policies at many schools.

In recent weeks, warned explicitly that their universities’ federal research funds could be cut off, the law schools at USC, Harvard, Yale and other institutions have reluctantly bowed to the Pentagon’s demands.

“Unfortunately, we no longer have a choice,” said Rob Saltzman, associate dean of the USC law school, where military recruiters last week took part in the school’s official interview program for the first time in more than a decade.

Among the handful of students who interviewed was Tina Mun, 25, who met Army and Air Force recruiters in a room posted with warnings from the law school that the military does not comply with its hiring standards.

The controversy did not bother her, said Mun, a second-year law student. “From what I’ve heard, [the military] is a great opportunity to be able to serve your country and get a lot of hands-on experience as a lawyer,” she said.

David Booher, who leads a group of gay students at the law school, said USC had done all it could to resist. “We realize this isn’t something they wanted to do,” Booher said.

Had the law school not complied, USC officials said, the university would have risked losing almost $300 million, or about 21% of its operating budget. The money, from an array of federal agencies, supports research into such disparate areas as education, diabetes and cancer prevention.

“It’s a pretty good hammer,” said Carol Mauch, the university’s associate general counsel. “It would be very difficult to lose [the funds] without risking a severe adverse effect on the entire university.”

At Harvard, where $328 million was at stake before the university retreated on the issue in late August, assistant law professor Heather Gerken described the Pentagon pressure in starker terms: “It’s essentially blackmail,” she said. “It’s a horrible position that we’ve been placed in.”

Bill Carr, the Defense Department’s principal director for military personnel policy, said the department is simply acting to bring remaining schools into line with federal law.

“This is federal law and that’s the choice the nation has made,” said Carr, who explained that the military services need to hire about 300 lawyers a year.

Yale said last week that it, too, would lift its ban on military recruiters to safeguard its federal funding. But the school also announced that it would seek ways to challenge the law through administrative appeals and possible legal action, apparently becoming the first university to do so.

Law school and university officials said their policies were not anti-military and were not intended to keep anyone who wanted to interview with recruiters from doing so.

“It’s not that we are against the military but that we see this as a way to indicate our disagreement with a policy that deprives the military of perfectly capable citizens,” said Kinvin Wroth, dean of Vermont Law School, an independent school that has maintained its ban on recruiters.

In the past, USC and other schools offered compromises. Military recruiters were allowed to make contact with interested students directly or to meet them in unofficial settings, but were denied access to on-campus campus programs or official interview activities.

Universities cited the conflict with the military’s policy of denying employment to anyone who is openly gay or bisexual. Under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy adopted in 1993 by the Clinton administration, recruiters are forbidden to ask prospective enlistees about sexual orientation, and gays and lesbians already in the military are prohibited from disclosing it.

In the mid-1990s, Congress strengthened the Pentagon’s hand by passing laws that linked certain categories of federal funding for law schools to the degree of access military recruiters were given to students. Congress later amended the law to exempt student aid money but left other funds at risk. And in 2000, the military issued new regulations stating that if any part of a university denied access to recruiters, federal funding for the entire university could be forfeited.

The number of law schools that bar the military from their interview programs has dropped since, education officials say, with fewer than two dozen holdouts today, mainly at private universities or free-standing law schools. Most public schools, including the University of California, dropped their opposition years ago.

Several university officials and faculty members speculated that the Pentagon has been emboldened to pursue stricter enforcement because of strong support from Congress and others for the war on terrorism.

“The only thing that has changed is 9/11 and anything that might be construed as disrespectful toward the military is much more difficult in this atmosphere,” Gerken of Harvard said.

Carr of the Defense Department acknowledged that the military had redoubled its efforts to ensure compliance but said that was not directly linked to last year’s events. He said he believed it had more to do with personnel changes among recruiters and growing awareness that a number of schools were continuing to bar recruiters.

But some law school faculty members and students said they believed the military’s stricter policy and the resulting controversy could scare away potential recruits. Only four USC law students interviewed with the recruiters this year, and school administrators said some may have stayed away because they feared protests, which never materialized.

Sean Bozarth, a second-year USC law student, said location may have been a factor too. He met with an Army recruiter last week at a USC-owned hotel just off campus, where other university-sanctioned employers also set up shop. Last year, under the now-abandoned compromise, he met with the same recruiter at the on-campus ROTC office-- a more convenient location than the hotel.

The military “had a good deal going before and had good access to the students,” said Bozarth, 24. “Sometimes, raising a stink doesn’t get you what you want.”