Military Recruits at HLS

Pentagon representatives visited Harvard Tuesday seeking to hire law students, despite recent efforts to keep military officials from using the school’s recruiting resources.

Dean Elena Kagan sent an e-mail to all Law School students and faculty Tuesday registering her vehement objection to the military’s presence on campus.

She wrote that the Armed Forces’ practice of discharging openly gay and lesbian service members—the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—is a “fundamental wrong” that “tears at the fabric of our own community, because some of us cannot, while others can, devote their professional careers to the defense of their country.”

Students placed pink toy soldiers in classrooms Tuesday to protest Pentagon recruitment. And Samuel P. Tepperman-Gelfant ’00, president of the student gay rights group Lambda, said larger protests were slated to coincide with the military’s planned follow-up visits to the school next month.

But the protests did not disrupt the interviews, which were conducted throughout the day in Griswold Hall, Law School spokesman Michael Rodman said,

A 25-year-old Law School policy requires that employers who use the school’s official recruiting resources must pledge not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The military refuses to sign the pledge and—until two years ago—was barred from recruiting at campus functions.

In 2002, the Pentagon—invoking a 1996 provision known as the Solomon Amendment—said that Harvard would lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding unless the Law School granted military recruiters an exemption from the nondiscrimination policy.

The Law School, under then-Dean Robert C. Clark, bowed to the Pentagon’s threat. But Kagan and over 50 other Law School faculty members filed a friend-of-the-court brief this past January backing the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), a coalition of over 20 law schools challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment. Also that month, Lambda filed a separate brief endorsing the coalition.

But University President Lawrence H. Summers has said that Harvard will not join FAIR in its pending federal lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

FAIR President Kent Greenfield, a Boston College law professor, said he expects the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to issue its ruling on the suit “any day now.”

The court has the power to immediately suspend enforcement of the Solomon Amendment nationwide.

Meanwhile, Tepperman-Gelfant said that Lambda is in negotiations with Kagan to add safeguards to the school’s nondiscrimination policies protecting transgender students.

Lambda’s proposed change would require that recruiters agree to respect employees’ “gender identity and expression.”

The school’s current policy might not shield transgender individuals from bias, according to Professor of Law Janet Halley.

According to Halley, the phrase “sexual orientation” usually refers to the gender of one’s sexual partner. “Many transgenders or transexuals stick with their ‘original’ sexual orientation,” she wrote in an e-mail. “And many ‘time’ things in such a way that their most vulnerable transition period is also a time of their not having sexual relations with anyone.”

Kagan said yesterday that talks on a change to the nondiscrimination policy are still in the “very preliminary stage.”

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.