WEB UPDATESupreme Court Upholds Solomon Amendment

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that colleges and universities which accept federal funding must allow equal access to military recruiters, delivering a major legal defeat to Columbia and other schools which oppose the Defense Department's policy on homosexuals.

In an 8-0 decision, the court rejected arguments by a group of law professors. They argued that schools have a First Amendment right to ban recruiters from their campuses if the schools consider the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy unfair.

The ruling reaffirms Washington's legal right to revoke funding from schools which enact such bans, even if they apply to all recruiting practices deemed discriminatory and not exclusively to those of the military.

"A military recruiter's mere presence on campus does not violate a law school's right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter's message," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court's opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito, who was not on the bench when oral arguments were heard in December, did not participate in the vote.

The decision on the case, Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, upholds the 1994 Solomon Amendment, which first barred the deployment of federal funds to schools that block recruiters. Justices overturned a 2004 appellate court ruling in favor of FAIR, which had invalidated the law.

In May 2005, Columbia's University Senate rejected a proposal to readmit the ROTC to campus by a vote of 53-10. That policy could be in peril under the reinstated law.

According the Solomon Amendment, federal funding can be pulled if a university "either prohibits, or in effect prevents the Secretary of a military department from maintaining, establishing, or operating a unit of the Senior Reserve Officer Training Corps - at that institution." This portion of the amendment, however, has not been enforced to date.

Before oral arguments were heard in December, Columbia and six other universities filed an amicus brief in support of FAIR, arguing that such institutions "cannot decline federal funding without fundamentally altering their character and dismantling a significant component of the nation's research and development infrastructure." Fifty-six members of Columbia's Law School faculty filed a separate amicus brief.

See complete coverage of the Supreme Court's decision and its implications for Columbia in Wednesday's Spectator.