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Vermont Law School gives up federal funding
Last week, Vermont Law School became one of only three schools in the country to relinquish their federal funding in order to ban military recruiters from campus. While many schools are trying to have it both ways--seeking to ban recruiters while still accepting Defense Department funding as well as grants and contracts from other federal agencies covered by the Solomon Amendment--a very few are choosing to free themselves from a constraint that they find oppressive by simply severing the financial ties that bind them.
Vermont Law School is one such school. Warned by the Pentagon that failure to allow recruiters on campus would result in a loss of the school's federal funding, Vermont Law School chose to accept that penalty rather than compromise its institutional conviction that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is discriminatory. The other two schools that have gone this route are also law schools: They are New York Law School and William Mitchell College of Law, located in St. Paul, MN.
Whatever one's opinion of either the Solomon Amendment or "don't ask, don't tell," one has to respect the moral clarity with which these schools have negotiated the issues. Of course, one must also recognize that it's far easier for a school that only receives $500,000 a year in federal funding, as Vermont Law School does, to act with moral clarity than it is for schools such as Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Pennsylvania, which all receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the federal government.
Posted by acta online at November 2, 2005 08:18 PM
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