The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider whether the government can withhold federal funds from colleges that bar military recruiters, wading into a dispute over campus free speech rights.
The justices will review in their next term beginning in October a ruling allowing law schools to restrict recruiters as a way of protesting the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy excluding openly gay people from military service.
The case sets up a free speech fight over schools’ rights of association and the government’s need to promote an effective military in time of war. It’s a dispute that has resonated on college campuses since at least the 1950s during Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communism crusade. At that time, left-leaning professors were forced to sign loyalty oaths to the United States or be fired.
During the Vietnam War, the presence of ROTC programs on some campuses prompted protests, with opponents seeing them as representatives of a wrongheaded foreign policy and the Pentagon as an institution incompatible with free thought and expression.
Now the debate involves the Pentagon’s desire to recruit military lawyers on campuses.
“The military services depend significantly on campus access to recruit the lawyers they need to carry out their missions,” Bush administration lawyer Paul Clement wrote in filings with the court.
But E. Joshua Rosenkranz, a lawyer representing 31 law schools suing the Pentagon, contends the government may not force schools to accept its discriminatory policy by linking military recruitment to federal research money.
“If, as the Supreme Court has held, bigots have a First Amendment right to exclude gays, then certainly universities have a First Amendment right to exclude bigots,” he said.
At issue is a 1994 federal law requiring universities that receive federal funds to give the military the same access as other recruiters. At some schools, the funding can be hundreds of millions of dollars.
