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Military misses opportunity at Yale
Despite last spring's Supreme Court ruling in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, Yale Law School continues to protest "don't ask, don't tell" by banning military recruiters--and it does so without fear of loss of federal funds. Since 2004, Yale has had a federal injunction allowing it to ban JAG recruiters while its own independent lawsuit against the Solomon Amendment is pending, and after last spring's ruling, the Yale faculty voted to continue its suit despite the extreme likelihood that Yale now has no case whatsoever.
But opinion on military recruiters varies widely at Yale, and--to its credit--the law school is interested in fostering debate on the question of "don't ask, don't tell." It even issued invitations to JAG recruiters to participate in scheduled panel discussions tomorrow and Friday--but was turned down because, as one recruiter put it, "My purpose in coming ... as a United States Navy representative is to provide information about a career in the Navy JAG Corps to any interested students or faculty members" and not, by implication, to debate policy. A JAG spokesperson confirmed this position: "It's only appropriate for the recruiter to do recruiting duties, not express personal opinions on any of these things. We don't want it to get mixed up." The Army JAG has yet to respond to the invitation.
While Navy JAG's position is well-taken--military recruiters are not policy makers and their job on campus is not to debate policy but to provide information that allows students to decide if they want to pursue military careers--this is nevertheless a lost opportunity, one that the Army will, hopefully, decide it does not also want to lose.
As David French explains, "The Army should show up for the debate. Given the horribly one-sided nature of elite education, it is likely that a JAG officer would present the first opportunity that many students have ever had to hear a defense of military service and Army history. The military has to directly engage the cultural elite to help close the widening gap between that elite and the rest of American culture."
Posted by acta online on October 04, 2006 at October 4, 2006 12:33 PM
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Comments
Why does the American military even bother with the cultural elite? It's time for the military, like the field of education, to privatize their enterprise. Why hire overpaid American lawyers when you can hire cheap lawyers from Bangalore? Why waste precious time seeking out poor Americans and tempting them with college degrees when you can find plenty of poor Africans willing to kill for a square meal?
It's obvious that the only reason a gay person would want to serve in the military is to prey on our brave young men and women (uh, that is, that the gay woman would prey on the brave women and the gay man would prey on the brave men).
But, we could kill two birds with one stone: privatize the military and hire gay men to appease the Yale gay-lovers. Apparently, there's a lot of genital mutilation and anal probing going on at CIA secret prisons, and who better than gay men in a privately hired gay "security services" unit to do all that messy mutilating and probing?
But, if all else fails, just arrest the Yale cultural elite. Habeus corpus being suspended and all . . . long live the Middle Ages!
Posted by: Jonah Goldberg at October 4, 2006 07:55 PM
Even I find it hard to believe that Yale is still trying to pursue litigation after a unanimous Supreme Court decision stating its very clear error. Having graduated from law school, I understand that law instructors are not practitioners, but the failure to understand basic constitutional law in this instance is astonishing, even for classroom teachers.
If they really cannot understand such basic legal logic, they are properly removed from any law school classroom. They cannot be trusted to instruct anyone about matters they themselves are apparently incapable of grasping.
With respect to military recruiters not coming to be viciously attacked at Yale, who could blame them? It's not like they could possibly reason with anyone who lacks the capacity understand the crystal-clear FAIR opinion.
Posted by: Federal Dog at October 5, 2006 07:30 AM
College campuses are precisely the venues where battles for the honour and efficacy of military service need to be fought. As I observed in the late sixties and early seventies, the "high-minded" motives of most draft protesters at bottom were craven and venal. In order of importance, a mon avis, they were:
(1) Fear of death or injury or disease
(2) Unwillingness to take orders from legitimately-constituted authority
(3) Inconveniences--like time away from inamoratae, family, friends, etc.; low pay, short haircuts, tough training, etc.
(4) Stigmata of having served in an institution mostly populated (as most fancied) by drawling bigots, reformed urban roughs and martinet-like authoritarians--
and finally, on occasion,
(5) Ideological "idealism" and "solidarity" with anti-colonial and "anti-imperialist" doctrines promulgated by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Timothy Leary, Alan Ginsberg (the latter two standing for the many pseudo-intellectual and "artistic" racaille that college campuses did and do attract--anyone else of their ages would have been arrested for hanging round schoolyards) and faineant "legions" of others.
I (in 1968), like David French, perhaps protested the protestors by enlisting in military service. I'll raise a glass of red-state beer to him tomorrow when I take me mum to the Friday fish-fry and music at my VFW post. I'll also raise a glass there to several of my favourite soldier authors: Socrates (an "author" without a book-credit), Thucydides, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Dante, Cervantes, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Descartes, Xavier de Maistre (I imagine this modest Savoyard and later Russian general blushing to be included in such company), Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Peguy, D'Annunzio, Drieu La Rochelle (though he disgraced himself in embracing collaborationism during the German occupation of France), Ernst Juenger, Yukio Mishima (a would-be soldier at least) and Solzhenitsyn, inter multos alios.
David French and FedDog are right again: On les aura!
Cheers for our brave military men and women and jeers for the the anti-military bigots at college campuses who simply cannot abide proximity to patriots,
Dr JA
Posted by: Jacques Albert at October 5, 2006 09:32 AM
Jaques, I'd swap number 3 above for number 1 in your list of motives.
I don't think those people can easily conceive of fear to their person. Inconvenience, yes. Fear of being shot or maimed . . . barely.
That's how shallow I think they are/were.
Clawmute
Posted by: Clawmute at October 6, 2006 11:40 PM
You know, Clawmute, you've got a point there--I know of quite a number of superannuated hippies and radicals still wallowing in what Piaget (I think) called the "adolescent fable" of immortality--nice correction!
Dr JA
Posted by: Jacques Albert at October 7, 2006 09:22 PM
sorry--i've been asked: racaille=scum
Posted by: Jacques Albert at October 7, 2006 09:24 PM