RIPPLE OF HOPE: Colleges banning military recruiters are no wiser than Solomon

Ordinarily I favor policies of engagement, but I cannot agree with David's proposal that colleges allow military recruiters on campus, despite the recent court ruling that they need not.

David's reasons are noble ones. The military needs men and women who are "aware of and willing to confront antigay bigotry." These people are especially needed in positions of legal and advisory authority. We might add that we want our military to have world class lawyers just as it has world class pilots. And, of course, we want our military to be respected in general, not shunned from campuses. All this seems right. David asks, "What better chance for a school to make its mark on the military than by encouraging its new attorneys to practice law in uniform?"

One answer is that schools can also make an impact by boycotting military recruiters, denying the military access to what it wants until it changes its policy. There are good reasons for starting with resistance rather than engagement. First, if schools allow military recruiters on campus then they are knowingly advantaging some of their students over others (in this case, straight students over gay students) and thereby participating in the discrimination. This sends the wrong message to our students.

Now, you might think that this is effectively true of many corporations and professions (including my own), which statistically favor white males. But, and this is the second reason for starting with resistance rather than engagement, there is a distinction to be made between a culture of discrimination and a policy of discrimination. David is surely right that engagement is the only way to permanently change a culture of discrimination. But the military also has a policy of discrimination, and that can be changed in a single day. The military differs from other recruiters in that it has a stated policy of discrimination, and one way to respond to that policy is to deny it what it wants until it changes the policy. We already know that strong leaders, such as President Clinton, have failed to change that policy even when they knew that it was the right thing to do. So-called pragmatic concerns trumped justice. The way to respond is to make injustice costly, so that these so-called pragmatic considerations motivate the military to do the right thing.

There is evidence that this sort of tactic works. My own main professional organization was among those that boycotted my city, Cincinnati, because of an anti-gay amendment added to the city charter in the 1990's. Eventually the city realized that the financial cost of losing conferences and meetings, as well as the bad press of being called discriminatory, was hurting the city. This fall the amendment was repealed. This does not make conservative Cincinnati a gay-friendly city overnight, but it is a step in the right direction. Likewise, clearly the military knows there will be a cost to not recruiting on campuses, or they would not be investing in lawsuits. This is part of the process for getting the policy changed.

There will still remain much work to be done to change the culture of discrimination. That cannot be mandated away. But the men and women who are "aware of and willing to confront antigay bigotry" will be far more effective when the rules are on their side.