Posted on 09/27/2005 7:40:37 PM PDT by RWR8189
WHEN NAVY JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL RECRUITER Brian Whitaker visited Yale Law School in October 2003 to meet with students interested in serving as Navy lawyers, his reaction must have been something like that of the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail; if it weren't for the honor of the thing, he'd probably rather have passed on it. Virtually all Yale law students had signed a petition vowing that they would not meet with Whitaker or other JAG recruiters. The petition was publicly displayed inside the law school as part of a protest display that included black and camouflage wall hangings. The one law student scheduled to meet with Whitaker cancelled the interview.
The ostensible cause of the consternation occasioned by Whitaker's visit was the military's compliance with the federal "don't ask/don't tell" law on homosexual conduct in the armed forces. Law schools across the country have hindered military recruiters from meeting with law students because the military's adherence to the "don't ask/don't tell" law violates nondiscrimination policies enforced by the schools against on-campus recruiters.
Whitaker's putative right to visit Yale Law School despite its nondiscrimination policy was attributable solely to the Bush administration's enforcement of Solomon Amendment requiring federally-funded universities to open their doors to military recruiters at the risk of losing federal funds. After 9/11 the Defense Department began to threaten enforcement of the amendment, and law schools began to comply. At Yale, for example, the law school has waived its nondiscrimination policy in order to preserve the university's annual $350 million in federal funding only since the fall of 2002. Then-law school Dean Anthony Kronman explained:
We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this--at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.
Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the "money talks" impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. Call it the Yale Doctrine: Taking your money for the good of the world.
LAW SCHOOLS have not confined their resistance to the Solomon Amendment to the kind of inhospitable welcome extended to Brian Whitaker. The month before Whitaker's visit, several unidentified law schools and law students filed a lawsuit--FAIR v. Rumsfeld--in New Jersey federal district court seeking to have the Solomon Amendment declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. According to the FAIR plaintiffs, the Solomon Amendment violates their academic and associational freedoms.
At the time the lawsuit was filed, the legal merits of the FAIR lawsuit seemed to rival those of obesity lawsuits brought by overweight consumers against fast food outlets. A divided panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held in favor of the plaintiffs, however, finding it likely that the Solomon Amendment unconstitutionally infringed the law school's First Amendment rights. The case now awaits a hearing by the Supreme Court this December.
THE NONDISCRIMINATION POLICIES enforced by many law schools against the military are themselves attributable to the requirements of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Mark Tushnet is Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and was president of the AALS in 2004; he is one of the most prominent left-wing law professors in the country. But before the filing of the FAIR lawsuit, Tushnet and other AALS board members voted unanimously not to initiate or join litigation against the Solomon Amendment. In an interesting memorandum to AALS members, Tushnet explored some of the difficulties such litigation would entail.
Among the reasons Tushnet advanced to support his vote is the fact that the nondiscrimination policies adopted by the law schools were themselves required by the AALS, the organization that serves as legal education's principal representative to the federal government:
I believe that there is some tension between the Association's assertion of a member school's right of academic freedom and the fact that many member schools adopted the policies at issue under the Solomon Amendment in response to the Association's interpretation of its non-discrimination policy. There's no technical problem here, but only an awkwardness: Putting it bluntly (as the defendants in litigation would), how can the Association assert that its member schools have made academic freedom judgments when the policies at issue were adopted because of pressure from the Association, not because of member schools' own reflection on their missions?
Tushnet's point was couched in terms of reflection on litigation strategy rather than on the merits of the lawsuit per se. His discussion of the merits was understated and tactful but equally revealing:
The litigation would have to take on two difficult issues, the scope of Congress's spending power (an unconstitutional conditions point), and the degree to which the courts should defer to Congress's judgments in matters involving the military forces. It is not impossible to succeed in those challenges, but the arguments are difficult and complex, and it was not clear to me that it would be a valuable expenditure of AALS officers' time to supervise the development of such arguments.
ONLY LAST WEEK, in another illustration of the Yale Doctrine at work, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan announced that the military would be allowed to recruit at the law school for the first time in years. Also last week, former acting-solicitor general Walter Dellinger filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of 40 Harvard Law School professors (including Dean Kagan). In the brief Dellinger argues that the Solomon Amendment applies only to schools that baldly prohibit military access on campus, not to schools' whose policies simply have the (allegedly) incidental effect of doing so. Dellinger distinguishes the law schools' contemporary anti-discrimination policies from Vietnam-era academic anti-military policies.
Dellinger's argument based on the language of the Solomon Amendment is, to say the least, strained, and the brief seems to provide evidence sufficient to rebut the gist of Dellinger's legal argument, but former Air Force Lt. Col. Raymond Swenson powerfully addressed this particular point in the conclusion of his 2003 guest column for the site FindLaw:
Don't believe this controversy is really about "don't ask, don't tell." Instead, it's about a longstanding animosity. Since the Vietnam War, this animosity by professors toward the military has continued unabated. It killed ROTC programs on many campuses. It is felt by military officers, such as myself, who have applied to attend law school under military scholarships. And it can be seen in the response to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Even if the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy were ended, plaintiffs would claim other reasons for banning the JAG. This isn't a First Amendment case about reforming the military. It's an anti-First Amendment case based on hatred for the military. As such, it should fail.
Some lawsuits deserve a fate worse than failure. While decent military officers like Brian Whitaker suffer the rudeness of their purported betters at Yale Law School and elsewhere in silence, the armed services of the United States are actively defending these schools from mortal peril. The rank ingratitude of those who should know better is a disgrace; it deserves to be widely recognized as such.
Scott Johnson is a contributing writer to THE DAILY STANDARD and a contributor to the blog Power Line.
Fewer JAGs is a good thing. Their very profession is disloyal and collusionary, much as their civilian analogs.
Seriously, while it was the dream of my husband and myself to attend the Ivy Leagues, for my kids I'm not so sure... Those places really are awful!
Maybe it will be better when it is time for them to go to college.
Jeez folks. We're talking about lawyers here. "Yale Law School"
As soon as any of them is offered $$$$ to take the other
side their lack of principles will show. They only take one
side until the $$$ are offered.
Of course then they won't be watched by their "peers."
:-)
And the dumb parents of those children KEEP PAYING DEARLY FOR THE BRAINWASHING!
Do not turn your life savings over to an America-hating, Christian-bashing, soldier-mocking, commie-loving college for them to undo everything you have ever taught your child that is good and right.
Why do parents love and nurture their children for eighteen years only to pay the commies to take them away to the "camps" to be indoctrinated?
American parents who do this are mad...absolutely out of their minds... to finance such a thing.
If every decent parent in America boycotted college support for one year, the insane asylums of brainwashing would fold like a wet cardboard box and the deranged communists in charge would be forced outside the walls of their hate factories to work for a living.
Starve the communist camps of money and they wither and die.
That is the fate they deserve for preaching against everything America represents and the decent American people believe.
My child is at one of the ivy schools. He also belongs to the Republican club. Other students on the campus might not have agreed with his opinion but they respected his right to say anything he wanted as long as he backed it up. He was not mocked either but encouraged to debate. He even attended an election night party with the profs and other students and cheered when the President won re-election along with other conservative students. You are all generalizing. Yes, there are a lot of liberal profs. There are also students that think for themselves. He considers himself lucky to be at Yale. He's receiving a top notch education and has not considered changing his political affiliation.
I hate that show..
Having actually served with JAG (albeit two weeks) it was one of the most enjoyable two weeks I had with the Navy..
The sad part of this article is that MOST law students are on Federal Financial Aid. Sort of makes me glad I ended up going to a podunk law school..
This was back in the 1970's when anti-Vietnam protesting had just ended and there were far-left wacko students and people holding radical far-left meetings and protests. But the professors and teaching assistants were totally professional and non-political. I've heard about some political talk in the Cal State college system (different from Univ. of California), but I never saw any of that at the University of California. I don't remember my classes even being slanted to the left, although it's a long time ago now.
Catherine Bell..... yummy!
Hate to tell you this.... But JAG the TV show is a Anti-Military show.
Mmmmmmmnnnn.....I know the one you're thinking of.
i know it!
It was misleading though and full of crappy stuff
Hey, no offense, but you need to get up to speed:
*10 to 1 Liberal to Conservative faculty ratio.
*Orwellian orientation sessions where most of the time is spent hammering the concept of thought crime home.
*Anti-Western, anti-patriarchal, anti-white, anti-American curricula up the wazoo.
*Affirmative action quotas and, of course, grade inflation.
*Separate dorms and graduation ceremonies according to ethnicity.
*Campus-wide no-go zones for military recruiters and ROTC.
*Speech codes to insulate the protected classes.
*Leftist ethno-supremacy organizations e.g. La Raza in full bloom.
And the list goes on...you should consider doing some homework!
Ha ha ha. With so many Yalies in power in D.C. it would be incredible if they weren't dipping into the trough.
Maybe there is a silver lining. One must assume that as the Ivy League schools continued to be exposed as "camps" they eventually become less appealing. Perhaps a corollary is the loss in stature of the NYT.
And then other top regional schools gain in stature.
Hopefully, this will follow as part of the overall conservative realignment in the media and congress. Radical left institutions losing their luster.
A media organ needs to provide rankings based on just how Orwellian the learning environment at the top schools has become. Put O'Reilly on the case.
Wow, That's great to hear that they are so "tolerant" of your son's beliefs. I guess things are changing faster than I thought!
Thanks for providing the data! Based on the article, I would have guess Yale was one of the worst places.
You should consider providing some hard facts and links to credible sources. I gave you a first hand factual account of my experiences at the Univ. of California and you respond with a bunch of unsubstantiated statements. Now go do YOUR homework and bring us some solid sources and not rumors and BS emails. Don't bother me again until you have a solid, balanced, and well researched post. I'm not going to read any unbalanced BS filled with anecdotal stories about a few wacko professors. Now get out of here and don't bother me until you've done your homework, and remember the key to your assignment is factual accuracy and balance. Don't just find a few isolated situations to support your claims.
I went to a top US law school. I took a class in negotiating and was forced to "partner" with gay guy in one negotiating exercise (we lost in the negotiation because he gave everything away!). That was my worst experience with a gay guy.
But what about all those guys in the military. Should a soldier really be forced to shower next to a self-proclaimed "flamer"? I don't think so.
DA740
Perhaps things have changed a lot since the late 1970's, but when I attended the Univ. of California I experienced absolutely no political "brainwashing" or "indoctrination" of any kind. Although I was a science major, there was no discussion of politics in any of my classes that I recall. I have no doubt that the professors at UC and most other colleges are primarily liberals or Democrats, but generally they are professionals and they keep political themes out of class discussion.
The administrators are probably worse than the professors because of misguided and arbitrary decisions like banning military recruiters from campus. But the statement that there is systematic "brainwashing" or "indoctrination" at the majority of US colleges is not supported by the facts. I will email my nephew who just graduated from Stanford and ask him about the level of political discussion these days. I would agree, however, that there are a small number of far-left liberal colleges (usually second-rate) where the whole atmosphere is so politically liberal that college amounts to a form of indoctrination. But those schools are fairly small in number and usually have less than 10,000 students (which is not too many by today's standards. Arizona State is up to 61,000 now.)
You are about as well-informed as someone who fell asleep under a tree for thirty years.
Your anectdotal account is hopelessly out of date. For you to base your contention that conservatives are too concerned about liberal "indoctrination" at American colleges on 1970's personal recollections is flat out nonsense.
I would feel an obligation to link and source my statements if I were writing a book or running for office. Until then I will let the lurkers and posters decide!
And if you feel so strongly about the veracity of any statements made here...why don't you disprove them?
BTW your position on anectodal comments is pure entertainment:
I'm not going to read any unbalanced BS filled with anecdotal stories...Don't just find a few isolated situations to support your claims.
On the other hand...
I will email my nephew who just graduated from Stanford and ask him about the level of political discussion these days.
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