U.S. Supreme Court to hear colleges' case

Law schools say allowing recruiters on campuses suggests they support discrimination.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court said Monday it would settle a pivotal battle over whether colleges can ban Pentagon recruiters from campuses without losing federal funds. The case pits free speech and academic freedom against the power of the purse and the need for a strong national defense.
A coalition of 31 law schools says forcing them to accommodate military recruiters also forces them to endorse the Pentagon's discrimination against gays and lesbians, which is at odds with the colleges' anti-discrimination policies.
They say a 1994 law that threatens federal funding for colleges that ban military recruiters violates their rights to choose what ideas they embrace or support. Other employers who discriminate also are banned from recruiting.
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia agreed with the colleges and declared the law unconstitutional.
But the government says the law, known popularly as the Solomon Amendment, is an essential tool for "effective recruitment ... to sustain an all-volunteer military, particularly at a time of war."
Government lawyers argue that the law doesn't violate the colleges' free speech rights because it doesn't force them to welcome recruiters. They can bar them and forgo federal funds.
"An educational institution covered by the Solomon Amendment has not been compelled to do anything," the government wrote in its brief asking the high court to intervene. "It has voluntarily chosen to enter into grant agreements or contracts with the United States and to accept funds under them, subject to a series of conditions. That is an entirely permissible quid pro quo in a bilateral relationship."
Recruitment needs
The case arises at least partly because of an increased need for recruitment following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The law has existed since 1994, and most colleges had worked out compromises by which they never banned military recruiters but also didn't give them the kind of choice access reserved for favored employers. Often, military recruiters were denied assistance from placement offices or were excluded from some recruiting events.
But after the terrorist attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon's need for recruits increased dramatically and the government began to pressure many law schools to stop their disparate treatment of military recruiters. They began to demand that they be given all the access nondiscriminatory employers were given, and in 2004, Congress amended the law to require as much.
Funding threatened
The increased pressure -- and threats of withheld funding -- led the coalition of 31 law schools to resist and file the litigation at issue before the high court now.
"For decades, law schools have practiced the values they preached by promulgating, and abiding by, anti-discrimination policies," the coalition said in its brief to the high court. "Such policies direct law school personnel not to support or assist any employer that refuses to certify it has a policy against invidious discrimination."
The coalition says the government is illegally using its purse strings to coerce the schools into abandoning their principles.
"More than four decades ago, [the Supreme Court] announced the principle that applies to this sort of condition: In the context of civil liberties, the government cannot attach strings to a benefit to 'produce a result which [it] could not command directly,'" the coalition told the court.