The federal government is a staggeringly large entity. It employs the equivalent of four million full-time workers. On an average business day, it spends more than $10 billion out of an annual budget of nearly $3 trillion to fund everything from faith-based health initiatives to the reconstruction of the oil infrastructure in Iraq. Thousands of individual appropriations funnel tax dollars through a bureaucratic maze toward ends mandated by Congress. The only appropriate way to keep such a large system from devolving into a mess of confusion and favoritism is to maintain a high degree of independence among projects and goals that are fundamentally independent.
The Solomon Amendment represents a deeply troubling break from this ideal. Without any convincing justification or motivation, Congress chose to conflate two issues that are otherwise separate: funding for academic research and access for military recruiters. Unless legislators have some reason to believe that those universities that allow access to military recruiters will do better research, their decision to support the amendment is deeply problematic. Simply put, federal funds should be allocated to those applicants who are best able to achieve the goals mandated for those funds. No additional strings should be attached, no additional conditions should apply.
In supporting the Solomon Amendment, our government has taken the first step down a slippery slope. While it may not seem offensive at first, the amendment represents a very real kind of coercion. A purely political restriction reducing the impact of scarce federal funds is unacceptable.
Schools should have the freedom to deny discriminatory organizations access to their campuses. While preventing a military presence on campus might limit the access some students have to the wages and financial aid provided by the military, so would banning an organization which has a history of discriminating against gays, Jews, blacks and women.
The undersigned members of the board encourage students, administrators and the federal government to look critically at the Solomon Amendment and reverse the unfortunate precedent it sets.
— Josh Brodie '06, Robby Braun '07, Jonah Perlin '07, Michael Reilly '07 and Elizabeth Shutkin '07
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