At ACTA Online, I've been writing a lot lately about Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Supreme Court case centered on whether the government should be allowed to withhold federal funding from schools that bar military recruiters as a way of protesting "don't ask, don't tell." I'd encourage readers who aren't already following the case to begin doing so--the debate about the validity of the Solomon Amendment contains within it a number of pressing interlocking questions about what constitutes free speech, what the government's responsibility to that nebulous category "academic freedom" is, what kinds of strategies would best serve law schools and other educational entities that object to "don't ask, don't tell," and, most basically, whether the government has the right to attach stipulations to the immense amount of money it hands out to higher education each year in the form of research grants and contracts.

My own position is that despite the heinousness of "don't ask, don't tell"--and I do think it's heinous--law schools are acting in bad faith when they bar, or seek to bar, recruiters from campus, particularly when they describe that barring as a legitimate expression of their institutional free speech. Schools that are genuinely concerned about the free exchange of ideas don't work hard to prevent their students from having as much informed access to as many potential employers as possible; they also don't place their own institutional activism ahead of their obligation to ensure that students may explore the full range of professional options open to them. That position has, in this binarized political climate, come to be labelled the conservative position; likewise, people who see the Solomon Amendment as a violation of schools' academic freedom and who think schools ought to be pre-emptively protesting a policy for students who, presumably, can't decide for themselves what to think about it, are seen as occupying the liberal side of the debate.

A piece in The New Republic plays with this rigid conservative-liberal split. "The Liberal Case for the Solomon Amendment" sees T. A. Frank arguing three interlocking points: first, that barring recruiters is not a good way to protest "don't ask, don't tell"; second, that our rapidly shifting cultural attitude toward homosexuality indicates the policy just won't survive much longer anyhow; and third, that what the debate about military discrimination against gays misses is that higher education has become impossibly and shamefully hostile to the idea of any educated person opting for military service. An excerpt:

No one among the classmates I knew in college would have been willing to take a few years to serve in the military while their friends were launching their lives and careers. This isn't simply selfishness; the entire structure of society discourages it. Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist who specializes in military issues, likes to point out that, in his Princeton class of 1956, over 400 students of about 750 served in the military. By 2004, that number was down to 8 students out of about 1,100. These numbers are for undergraduates, of course, not law school students. But the fact is that the entire culture of elite education--undergraduate, graduate, and professional--has grown hostile towards the idea of military service over the past 50 years. Permitting the Pentagon to puncture the self-imposed bubble of privileged schools is essential to changing this mindset.

The Solomon Amendment controversy, in sum, awakens two competing liberal imperatives: promoting equality for gays and lesbians; and encouraging all members of society--and not just a segregated warrior class--to sacrifice for our national security. One of these efforts is going quite well; the other is going quite poorly. This suggests that liberals who passionately support the universities in the lawsuit have the wrong fight on their minds. Military culture with respect to gays and lesbians is not going to change in response to a boycott by a few schools. (If anything, such a boycott would only make military culture more insular and therefore less tolerant.) And "don't ask, don't tell" is likely to disappear on its own. On the other hand, while most Americans have grown more tolerant of gay rights in recent decades, elites have become increasingly unwilling to serve in the military. The real shame at the heart of the Solomon Amendment scuffle, then, isn't the possibility of students being confronted by representatives from an organization that discriminates against gays and lesbians. It's the possibility of elites becoming even more isolated from the armed services that keep all of us safe.

No doubt, most of the law school deans and gay rights activists who support the ban on military recruiters consider themselves to be enlightened and progressive. But sometimes being progressive involves emerging from righteous isolation and deigning to mingle with an imperfect world.

An aside from the later focus of the post:

Erin wrote

"and, most basically, whether the government has the right to attach stipulations to the immense amount of money it hands out to higher education each year in the form of research grants and contracts."

This is not a problem just of higher ed. For some time now, the NSF Education and Human Resources directorate (E H R ) has been offering large grants, e.g. $5 million over 5 years, to schools with the stipulation that the schools alter curriculum in ways aligned with discovery learning and constructivist principles. $5M seems like a lot, but in most cases this is a small fraction of overall budgets for the districts involved. Thus, the E H R supplies a marginal amount of money to cash strapped school systems and extracts maximal changes in curriculum. This is not a bug, it is a deliberate feature. This began long before the current administration and was particularly favored when Luther Williams was the director or E H R. The NSF is excellent at supporting real science, but the E H R people seem to have missed the data boat on what works.