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LOCAL News :: Peace

Federal Plaza Protest Targets Military Recruiters

Chicago students, teachers, war veterans and gay rights and anti-war activists gathered in Federal Plaza on December 6, to protest military recruitment on school campuses and call for the freedom to prohibit recruiters from school grounds. The event, just one in a host of anti-recruitment actions happening nationwide on December 6, coincided with the oral arguments for FAIR v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case which will decide whether universities have the right to restrict recruiters’ access to their students. Currently, the decade-old Solomon Amendment mandates that schools allow recruiters on campus.

The coordinators of Campus Anti-War Network (CAN), which organized the Dec. 6 protests, say that recruitment is one of the key issues for the anti-war movement today.

“We are part of a building resistance to the military occupation of our schools from coast to coast,” said Dennis Kosuth, a student at Malcolm X College and a coordinator of Counter-Recruitment Day in Chicago. “Our project of ending this war requires that we connect the popular antiwar sentiment to this much needed action.”

Yet the Solomon Amendment now curbs most counter-recruiting efforts: schools that prohibit recruiters or do not provide them with "equal access" to campus are denied all federal funding. In 2002, the law was toughened, so that even if only one department of a university—for example, its law school—bars recruiters from campus, all federal funds are withheld, including critical money for medical and psychological research that the nation depends on.

Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), a national organization of law schools that is serving as the plaintiff in the case against the Solomon Amendment, argues that the mandate to allow recruiters on campus violates universities' constitutional right to freedom of speech.

"Just as civil rights advocates have a First Amendment right to boycott a racist business, law schools have a First Amendment right to boycott discriminatory employers," said Joshua Rosencrantz, one of FAIR's attorneys, who calls the Solomon legislation a violation of schools' right to freedom from compelled speech. Many law schools have banned recruiters because of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which discriminates against gay and lesbian students.

The Solomon Amendment makes the military's messages of violence a
mandatory part of students' college experience, says Counter-Recruitment Day endorser Kathy Kelly, who coordinates the Chicago-based Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

"It is foolish and dangerous to rule that U.S. education facilities must instill military culture and the solutions pursued by the U.S. military in every institution of higher learning," Kelly said.

Counter-Recruitment Day organizers also hold that military recruiters use deceptive, manipulative strategies to convince students to enlist. The recruitment drive is aimed primarily at lower-income Americans, says Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an NYU student and a head organizer with CAN.

"Recruiters take advantage of the inequality and segregation of this country, in which a whole segment of society is written off, and hold up joining the military as a way out," Wrigley-Field said.

According to a recent CAN report, recruiters often lead students to believe that joining the military will enable them to pay for a college education. Yet only 15 percent of soldiers complete a college degree, and less than 10 percent use Army funds to do so. In terms of job training—another promise the military makes to new recruits—an American Friends Service Committee report notes that veterans earn 11 to 19 percent less than non-veterans with similar backgrounds.

“The fact is that military recruiters realize that there is a desperation out there and that they need to tap into it,” Kosuth said. “While we cannot, as counter-recruiters, promise money for college, jobs, health care, we certainly emphasize the negative aspects that accompany [the military’s] promises, and also point to the contradiction of the government spending massive amounts of money to dominate a part of the world rich in oil resources, which then do not go towards things such as a national health care program or federally sponsored higher education.”

Counter-recruitment, then, is not simply about getting recruiters out of the schools: it's about presenting young people with alternatives to enlisting. Many of the Counter-Recruitment Day actions involved direct protests staged at recruiting stations, in which protestors distributed information to potential recruits. The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, an endorser of the Dec. 6
protests and a key player in the counter-recruitment movement, councils prospective recruits in the dangers of military involvement, non-military ways to finance college and alternative service learning opportunities.

This type of counter-recruitment is especially important in Chicago, according to Ken Nielsen of Chicago Veterans for Peace.

“Chicago's biggest problem in terms of recruitment is how militarized our public schools are,” Nielsen said, noting that Chicago has the largest number of JROTC programs of any city in the country. “These programs are little more than recruiting tools for the military that start conditioning students at a very young age towards the military instead of towards higher education.”

In the past couple of months, the counter-recruitment movement has seen a string of successes. Sixty percent of voters in San Francisco approved a proposition last month to kick recruiters off campuses and fund non-military scholarships. The first national student-organized anti-recruitment day, Not Your Soldier Day of Action, rocked 40 campuses on November 17. As the verdict on FAIR v. Rumsfeld draws closer, activists are crossing their fingers for another victory, hoping that if given the chance, schools will say no to recruiters on
campus.

"The majority is with us in opposing the war and military recruitment," Wrigley-Field said. "It's time to get that majority organized to get recruiters out of our schools."
 
 

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