Lucye Rafferty/The Hoya Law professor Elizabeth Patterson called the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy “totally, unequivocally, fundamentally wrong” at a protest last Tuesday outside the Washington Court Hotel, where recruiters conducted interviews for the Air Force JAG Corps.
Nearly 40 Georgetown University Law Center students and 12 professors protested the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and the Solomon Amendment, which requires universities to allow military recruiters on campus or face the loss of federal funds, outside the Washington Court Hotel by the Law Center last Tuesday.
Protesters stayed outside while the “Government Week” interviews, which included recruiters from the Air Force JAG Corps, were held inside the hotel, before moving to the Capitol steps for a teach-in. Although the university had not previously assisted the military with recruiting on campus, it began to do so last year with the enforcement of the revised Solomon Amendment. After the amendment passed in 1995, the university allowed recruitment but recruiters maintained a decreased presence on the law center campus until the Department of Defense issued a stricter reinterpretation in 2002. The new interpretation responded to several universities, including Harvard and Columbia, which had threatened to bar military recruitment entirely.
“We’re still here a year after, protesting the same policy last year,” Law professor Elizabeth Patterson said. “This policy is totally, unequivocally, fundamentally wrong.”
Turnout at this year’s protest was less than the nearly 100 protestors that turned out for last year’s rally.
“We’re here protesting the `Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, which is injurious and wrong-headed. Hopefully, we won’t have to do this again next year,” Boaz Green (LAW ’05), one of the protest organizers.
Others, including Ian Dietz (SFS ’04), a cadet first lieutenant in the Army ROTC program, disagreed with the protesters’ message about the Solomon Amendment.
“As someone who is loyal to the Army and what it stands for, I think it’s fair for them to have a presence on campus,” he said. “The federal government is free to give institutions money. If institutions choose not to follow the federal government’s guidelines, they choose not to get the money.”
Dietz, however, said he was not opposed to the protest itself.
“I joined ROTC and the Army to protect that kind of thing. As a student I can understand both sides of the debate, and without criticism, nothing would get better,” he said. “It’s just an issue that I don’t personally agree with.”
The university does not allow on-campus recruiters who do not sign on to the university’s non-discrimination policy, which has led to increased support for a ban on military recruitment on campus until the military ends the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Judith Areen, executive vice president for law center affairs and dean of the law center, said that the university could not risk banning military recruiters from campus because it would jeopardize federal funding for the entire university.
“Federal law as changed by the Solomon Amendments provides that if even one school in a university bars military recruiters, the entire university may lose all of its federal grants and contracts,” Areen said. “At Georgetown, the loss could extend to the tens of millions of dollars of federal research grants awarded both at the Medical Center and the Main Campus.”
Areen said that the protests demonstrated that the university can balance its policy of nondiscrimination without excluding students interested in pursuing careers in the military.
“The Law Center is committed to making clear to our students that the current [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] policy of the Armed Services . is not consistent with our policy that employers who recruit at the Law Center agree not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. We are also committed to ensuring that our students who want to interview for jobs in the Armed Services are able to do so,” she said. “On Tuesday, we demonstrated that we can maintain both commitments.”
The protest coincided with a lawsuit, Burbank v. Rumsfeld, filed by 21 law professors and six students from the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 1. U. Penn was threatened with losing $500 million in federal funding, unless the university began treating military recruiters like all other employers, despite the fact that the military could not honor the school’s anti-discrimination policy.
After 1998, Penn established a policy similar to Georgetown’s, allowing recruiters on campus, but not actively assisting them. In January, Penn received a letter from the Air Force stating the school had failed to comply with the law. In the current lawsuit the plaintiffs hope to either have the law declared unconstitutional, or decide that Penn was in accord with the law.
According to law professor Michael Siedman, a similar suit is not a current plan at the law center. “As far as I know, it is not planned at present,” he said.
This lawsuit follows a separate lawsuit filed against the federal government on Sept. 20 by the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, an anonymous coalition of law schools, professors and students. Georgetown University has not disclosed its involvement in the lawsuit, but professors at the protests said that the university was not a plaintiff.
“We as students are probably not going to change this policy, but it is very important for faculty. It is important to join this lawsuit publicly,” Michael Boucai (LAW ’05), another protest organizer, said. “It is important that they do everything they can do to join FAIR publicly.”
The day before the protest, on Sept. 29, an anonymous letter was placed in student on-campus mailboxes discouraging student involvement in the protest.
The author was concerned about several possible effects of the protest, including interference with the interviews, difficulty in getting to the interviews, as well as the possibility that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy might become an issue in the interview.
Additionally, the letter addressed the problem of “dealing with an interviewer right after a couple hundred people yelled and screamed at him or her” and more generally, the possible “harm to students in pursuit of their career objectives.”
The organizers of the protest, including Green, Boucai, Erin Ekeberg (LAW ’05), Ryan Harrington (LAW ’05) and aryana Zubok (LAW ’05) wrote a response letter to the entire community on Sept. 29.
The response letter stated that “the purpose of our protest is to get these messages out. We do not block student or interviewer access to the interviewing site. We support GULC students who believe that discrimination is wrong and who wish to interview and obtain jobs with JAG, and we are hopeful that they will be able to change `Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ from within.”
“We are not keeping anyone from going in,” Ekeberg said. “Our protest is really about getting our message out.”
– Staff writer Nick Timiraos contributed to this report.