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The week in protest
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Rumseld v FAIR, students on campuses across the country are mobilizing to protest the presence of military recruiters on campus. At George Mason, a student staging a solo protest against military recruiters was arrested after getting into a scuffle with a recruiter; the ACLU is now defending him. At Stanford, a coordinated protest included an oration by the dean of the law school and appears to have disrupted--or dissuaded--JAG recruiters: "As the protesters left," the Daily noted, "they leaned their picket signs up against the side of room 172, where the JAG recruiters were supposed to be conducting interviews. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Recruit," read one sign. Inside, the lights were off and the recruiters were nowhere to be found. The posted schedule for interview times was conspicuously empty." Protests also took place at Cornell, Iowa, and Harvard.
Significantly, none of the protesting student groups is suggesting that their school forego federal funds in order to secure the unequivocal right to ban recruiters. Protesters appear to want their schools to stand up for certain principles, but they seem to think that there should be no costs associated with adhering to a principled position--even when those costs would not be terribly high. Holyoke Community College, for example, receives a miniscule amount of federal money--$7 million a year, as compared to the hundreds of millions received annually by institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. But at HCC, protesters want to have it both ways: "Students said they believe the school can legally ban military recruiters from campus without risking the $7 million in federal assistance." They are wrong about that, but the reasoning is telling. For these protesters, taking the moral high ground apparently involves redefining the law to suit themselves. In other words, the principled protesters at Holyoke Community College are not principled at all.
Posted by acta online at October 7, 2005 10:24 AM
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