The American Spectator

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Special Report

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Academia should be a place, as Dr. Alan Charles Kors of the University of Pennsylvania notes, where individuals are granted the dignity and strength of meeting speech or ideas that they abhor with further speech or alternative ideas, with reason, with evidence, with cold contempt, or with moral outrage or moral witness. It should not be a place where prospective employers are banned merely because their recruitment policies do not measure up to the politically correct notions of the day.

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." Churchill, of course, was trying to stop the rise of Hitler while Britain's intellectuals were busy casting the country into "a mood of unwarrantable self abasement."

As a recent law school graduate who is currently serving as an officer in the Judge Advocate General Corps, I witnessed first hand the cold contempt with which military members and officials are treated by academics. Prior to the enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, no information was made available at my law school regarding the opportunities of military service and certainly no recruitment efforts were allowed. These policies were altered only when federal funding was threatened.

Today the United States carries on its efforts against the global terrorist threat while the occupants of the ivory tower seek to deny the military the indispensable resources of the respective student bodies. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals was legally and morally wrong to assist them in perpetuating this true discrimination.

topics:
Education, Constitution, Law, Military