The American Spectator

That leaves us with one remaining option for commissioning the majority of new second lieutenants and ensigns to lead our troops: the ROTC, which “continues to be a particularly significant vehicle for increasing [minority] representation in the officer ranks.”

As the military amici astutely point out, there’s only one catch: “To obtain an ROTC scholarship, a candidate must be admitted to the hosting college or university. The pool of minority candidates at any given ROTC member institution is thus limited to the number of minority students admitted.”

Thus, our nation’s best colleges and universities must play a part, even an integral one, in the military’s quest for a diverse and top-notch officer pool. If not, they are shirking their duty — both to the national defense and to the very goal of diversity that they profess to cherish.

If our elite educational institutions are as proud as they say of their record of diversity, and if the military feels that diversity in its ranks is crucial to national security, then surely our great universities have an extraordinary opportunity to do a patriotic service and at the same time score a big victory for racial diversity. To make this happen, all they have to do is let their student bodies be as accessible as possible to military recruiters and opportunities.

Sadly, when our top undergraduate schools keep ROTC off campus, and when our top law schools keep military recruiters at a distance, they are acting in a manner antithetical to both the interest of the country and the notion of diversity. Indeed, they are merely reinforcing what Colin Powell called the “antidemocratic disgrace” of Vietnam. As the Secretary of State wrote in his autobiography My American Journey, “I can never forgive a leadership that said in effect: These young men — poorer, less educated, less privileged — are expendable but the rest are too good to risk.”

NOW THAT AMERICAN FORCES HAVE captured Saddam Hussein, legal scholars will no doubt have plenty of opinions about how he should be tried. Probably some of the 21 Penn law professors now suing to keep military recruiters out of their career office will show up as talking heads on TV, telling the military what they should do. Of course, when the government came to them looking for potential JAG officers, it received the cold shoulder… and a lawsuit.

Winston Churchill warned his country in 1933 that England’s “worst difficulties … come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.” While Churchill was trying to stop the rise of Hitler, Britain’s leading intellectuals were busy casting the country into a “mood of unwarrantable self abasement.”

Today, as the United States wages war against a global terrorist threat that seeks our destruction and has struck civilians on our own soil, the nation’s elite law schools seek to deny the military the benefits of their resources and student body. The courts should not aid them in this endeavor.