YALE LAW PROFESSOR PETER SCHUCK weighs in against Yale’s exclusion of military recruiters:
Through his arguments, Schuck says that Law School opponents of the Defense Department’s recruitment policy have been acting in a contradictory manner. The Law School itself discriminates against white and Asian applicants through the affirmative action process, he said.
“It seems odd for the schools to insist that they may define merit in a way that disadvantages white, Asian and indeed straight applicants (if schools deem other minorities or gays ‘diversity enhancing’) but that the military may not define merit in a way that disadvantages gays,” Schuck writes in his article.
Another irony Schuck presents is that those same faculty members who filed suit against the Department of Defense do not oppose the federal government’s power to cut off funding from a university that itself discriminated, citing a case involving Bob Jones University in which law schools publicly opposed the government’s subsidization of an institution that discriminated against blacks.
Schuck stresses in his article that he favors barring discrimination against gays and protecting academic autonomy, but that students themselves should be able to decide if they want to enter the military.
“We should not reward or punish the choices of our students but encourage them to make their own moral choices as informed as they can be by us,” Schuck said.
Indeed.