E-Mail This Article to a Friend COME DIE IN IRAQ The on-campus recruitment battle BY DEIRDRE FULTON

At the end of the summer, Department of Defense officials admitted publicly that the department had fallen far short of its recruitment goals for this year. (The Army is expected to meet or exceed its re-enlistment goals, but it is expected to fall short by more than 10,000 new recruits, or 12.5 percent.) To reverse the trend, recruiters have been offering more money to enlistees, in the form of signing bonuses and college scholarships, and pushing to ease both age and testing requirements for potential recruits. But increasingly, recruiters find themselves struggling not only against dismal headlines, but against a growing anti-war movement that aims to block recruitment on high-school and college campuses through a strategy they call counter-recruitment.

"The key thing is action," says 22-year-old Tom Arabia, a New England Conservatory of Music graduate who leads campus counter-recruitment efforts — such as protests, rallies, and information campaigns — in the Boston area. When he "dorm-storms" on the Northeastern University campus, knocking on students’ doors and asking them how they feel about the war, more than half say they disapprove, Arabia reports. "People want to do shit right now. When we counter-recruit, we hit the military where it hurts. It’s getting them right in the jugular."

Counter-recruitment forces will also wage battle in Washington, DC, on December 6, when the Supreme Court debates whether, under the terms of the Solomon Amendment, the government can deny federal funds — in the form of student aid or research grants — to those colleges and universities whose law schools limit military recruitment.

The case, Rumsfeld v. FAIR, applies only to law schools, which almost uniformly include sexual-orientation clauses in their anti-discrimination policies. Such institutions have in the past balked at affording the military — which discriminates against gays and lesbians with its "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy — the same recruitment assistance they give to other, nondiscriminatory employers. But today, all but three law schools (Vermont, William Mitchell, and New York Law School) in the country have buckled under the Solomon Amendment, which mandates that institutions of higher education give military recruiters equal access to students — or risk losing a lot of money (not just at the law school, but university-wide). Harvard, for example, stands to lose more than $300 million if federal money is pulled.

"It’s about whether schools can refuse to be an agent of government discrimination," says BC law professor Kent Greenfield, who is leading the legal charge against the Solomon Amendment with the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR). "The government is trying to say that they can force their way on to campus by way of federal funding.... It’s punishment of law schools for the failure to be patriotic enough in the eyes of Congress."

"As much as the government tries to portray its position as a plea for equal treatment, it is nothing of the sort," FAIR’s Supreme Court brief reads. "It is a demand for exceptional treatment — a demand to be the only discriminatory employer that a law school will assist."

Versions of the Solomon Amendment have been around since 1994, when the law was introduced primarily to combat those schools that did not allow military recruiters on campus. ("These colleges and universities need to know that their starry-eyed idealism comes with a price," one of the amendment’s co-sponsors said at the time.) However, the law’s parameters have widened over the years, and since 9/11, they have been vigorously enforced. (Calls to local colleges and universities elicited similar robotic responses from school officials, all variations on one theme: This institution allows military recruiters in compliance with federal regulations.)

And although FAIR v. Rumsfeld applies only to law schools, Greenfield thinks the decision will have implications for undergraduate campuses and high schools, where yet another fight is taking place. Many teenagers — and their parents — are surprised to learn that as part of the already-controversial No Child Left Behind Act, students’ names are automatically included in recruiter databases unless a family places their child on the equivalent of a military do-not-call list. The Boston Public School District has been proactive about letting parents know how to opt out, issuing several public announcements and sending letters home. (More than 2000 students out of about 20,000 removed their names from recruiters’ lists for the 2005-’06 school year.) But recruiters still have far too much access, says Leave My Child Alone co-founder Megan Matson, who says she was "outraged at [the policy’s] inclusion in a piece of learning legislation.

"I think parents need to be a part of that, because there’s much more at stake than that," Matson says on the phone from San Francisco, where city voters passed an anti-campus-recruitment-policy proposition on November 8. "This is really about combat. And you’ve gotta be ready for that when you make this decision."

On December 6 at 4 pm, local campus counter-recruitment forces will gather at the Park Street T stop to rally against the Solomon Amendment.