Solomon Amendment: Part IV

For those interested in a military that draws from its entire society and tries to gather the best quality officers and enlisted personnel for its ranks: the Solomon Amendment (let recruiters on campus or loose all Federal funding) and its battle to the Supreme Court is required reading. Via Powerline, we are reminded that the next step is coming up.

The Solomon Amendment conditions the receipt by universities of federal funds on their allowing military recruiters access to university students on campus. Elite law schools, deans, and professors have strenuously resisted the Solomon Amendment. They claim that forcing them to choose between losing federal money and countenancing appearances by representatives a bigoted (against gays) military violates their right to freedom of association. In 2003 they commenced litigation challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment under the auspices of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR). The Third Circuit Court of Appeals sided with "FAIR" and held the Solomon Amendment unconstitutional. As I mentioned, the Supreme Court will review that decision this term and, in my opinion, probably reverse it. Scott has written extensively about the case, most recently here.
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Here is the Polsby amicus (co-authored by professors Nelson Lund and Joseph Zengerle of George Mason and private attorneys Andrew McBride, William Consovey, and Seth Wood of the Wiley, Rein & Fielding law firm). The brief is something of a blog legend -- Todd Zywicki, another George Mason law professor, used his space at the Volokh Conspiracy to successfully "recruit" other law professors to sign the brief.

Paul nails the core of this issue.

One of the many great points Dean Polsby made about the Solomon Amendment yesterday was that the law schools challenging the Amendment seem motivated more by anti-military sentiment than by sympathy for gay rights (the suit assumes the legality of the underlying "don't ask, don't tell" policy). Polsby, a professor for decades, notes that the liberal professoriate was defending its sensibilities against the military at a time when gay rights were a non-issue.

If, as I expect, the Supreme Court upholds the Solomon Amendment, both sets of lofty motives (anti-military animus and pro-gay rights sentiment) will likely be insufficient to induce liberal law schools to stand on principle and turn down federal money.

Gay rights is just the latest excuse for these self-important children from 18 to 80 to stick their tongues out at their nation and show off to each other.

A side note to this is the money thing. Money is not an issue. Any excuse to bring up Ben Stein, from last weeks NYT, he talks about money and his school, Yale.

According to what I read, Yale has an endowment of something approaching $13 billion. Under the stewardship of its top-flight investment manager, David F. Swensen, it has compounded recently at the rate of very roughly 20 percent a year.
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at this point, is it an investment bank or a school? I am really not sure, and this troubles me.

Weep not for Yale and the others if they are forced to pay for their bigotry and spoiled behavior by loosing Federal cash. They have plenty of money, and will be just fine without cash from middle class Americans.

If you want to dig around some more on the Solomon Amendment, great write-up from earlier this year here.

If you want to catch up on Parts I-III and another shot or two; go here, here, here, and to a lesser extent here.