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More on the high stakes in Rumsfeld v FAIR
For universities seeking to bar military recruiters while still accepting federal funding, hundreds of billions of federal research dollars hang in the balance. That tends to be what we hear about when we listen to arguments against the Solomon Amendment. As the amicus brief filed last month by Harvard, Penn, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Chicago, and Cornell put it, "Universities cannot decline federal funding without fundamentally altering their character and dismantling a significant component of the nation's research and development infrastructure." But there is a crucial flip side to this argument that has not received nearly as much play: Without access to campus recruiting, the quality of the American military will also "alter" in "character" and a "significant component" of national defense may be "dismantled."
The U.S. Army is already suffering a significant recruiting shortfall, and is compensating for that by lowering intellectual standards for recruits:
The US Army has fallen more than eight percent short of its recruitment goal for the year, army officials said, acknowledging a setback for plans to enlarge a force strained by combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.The army is responding in part by increasing the percentage of prospective recruits with low scores on aptitude tests who will be eligible for service, officials said.
"It does have an impact," General Richard Cody, the army's vice chief of staff, said of the recruiting shortfall.
Cody said the army ended the 2005 fiscal year September 30 with a little more than 73,000 new recruits, well short of its goal of 80,000 new recruits.
He said the shortfall means that the army will not be able to increase in size to 502,000 as planned, and instead will lag at around 492,000 to 493,000.
The increase was supposed to give the army a cushion as it builds 10 new combat brigades and increases the size of its combat force by at least 30,000 troops from 315,000 today.
[...]
On recruiting, Harvey said the army has decided to adopt Defense Department quality standards that are less demanding than those followed by the army.
The army required that 67 percent of its new recruits score in the top 50 percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, while the Defense Department set a lower 60 percent level for the services as a whole.
Barring military recruiters from campus means preventing them from coming into contact with the most educated and intellectually able prospects in the nation. People may disgree about the validity of "don't ask, don't tell." But surely we can all agree that the last thing the military needs is a systematic dumbing down.
Posted by acta online at October 17, 2005 01:44 PM
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