Legal Commentary

Will the End of Don?t Ask Don?t Tell Lead to the Return of ROTC Programs to Elite Universities?

By Ilya Somin

At the Weekly Standard blog, Cheryl Miller asks whether the repeal of Don?t Ask Don?t Tell will lead to the return of ROTC programs to elite university campuses [HT: here]. In recent years, university officials have defended the exclusion of ROTC from campus as a way of countering the military? discrimination against gays and lesbians, and have vehemently denied that they are antimilitary. With the end of DADT, that obstacle to ROTC should be removed.

As Miller points out, the Pentagon may have reasons for its own for choosing not to establish ROTC programs at some elite schools. And there are those in the military who strongly dislike elite academia. Thus, some schools might not get ROTC programs any time soon even if university administrators support the idea. Still, nothing prevents university officials from announcing that they would now welcome the return of ROTC programs if the military is interested. President Obama urged them to do just that in his recent State of the Union speech.

The same point applies to law schools. After having lost a Supreme Court case over the issue, law schools were forced to permit military recruiters to interview on campus as a condition of receiving federal funding under the Solomon Amendment. In the aftermath of this legal defeat, most law schools admitted recruiters, but continued to emphasize that they were doing so under duress. Some also adopted various ?ameliorative practices? required by the American Association of Law Schools, and designed to emphasize their opposition to the presence of military recruiters. Both the AALS and individual schools should repeal the varous ameliorative practices and officially indicate that they now voluntarily welcome military recruiters on the same basis as other interviewers. As recently as May 2010, the AALS emphasized that its opposition to military recruiters should not be interpreted as ?antimilitary,? but was instead merely an effort to oppose discrimination against gays and lesbians. The time has come to live up to those principles.

For reasons I outlined here, I think that it was wrong to exclude ROTC and military recruiters even while DADT was in force, despite the fact that I also believe that that policy was a serious injustice. Regardless, with DADT on its way out there is no longer any plausible reason for universities to exclude either ROTC programs or military recruiters.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on February 01, 2011 (boomark / email).