Solomon Amendment Met With Student Apathy

Since the takeover of University Hall in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam War, Harvard’s relationship with the military has alternated between tense and toxic.

Over the past quarter century, the flash point for this tension has been an obscure federal law known as the Solomon Amendment, the brainchild of a conservative New York congressman who was a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. And it’s no surprise why: the central purpose of the Solomon Amendment was to increase the role of the military on college campuses.

When originally drafted, the amendment denied federal funding to students who did not register for the draft. Even in the subsequent changes to the law, the Solomon Amendment has retained its essential character: telling universities that they must choose between allowing a greater presence for the military on their campuses or forgoing some form of federal funding.

In 1983, the first full year the Solomon Amendment was operational, both the draft registration—which had been ordered by President Carter because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—and the presence of ROTC on campus were major issues, though they mainly affected a core of socially-active students, who themselves found a sympathetic ear within the administration.

ROMANTICIZING THE 70s

John D. Solomon ’85, who covered the controversy for The Crimson, said that while the Solomon Amendment was an issue on campus, it wasn’t the biggest area of contention with regard to the military at Harvard because it did not affect many students.

“It only impacted men who had not registered, and of those it only impacted those who took financial aid,” Solomon said.

Draft registration more generally, not just in the context of cutting off financial aid fund for non-registrants, was a bigger issue that year, earning mention in a Crimson recap of the 1982-1983 academic year as an issue that had occupied the campus’ attention. But even that article took care to show that the stir over the draft registration was limited: apart from an October rally on the steps of Memorial Church to oppose draft registration, little else happened.

Paul A. Engelmayer ’83, who served as editorial chairman of The Crimson, said that there were several issues that brought students out in protest during his four years at Harvard: among them were divesting South Africa to protest the nation’s Apartheid regime, and concern over nuclear weapons and proliferation.

Engelmayer added that the classes that graduated in the early 1980s who wanted to protest the military were following in the footsteps of older siblings or cousins who had spent their college days protesting the Vietnam War.

“Student activism was very much still romanticized,” Engelmayer said.

But again, the actual follow-through on campus activism was iffy, as some of the attempts at organizing demonstrations revealed.

In March 1983, the fledgling Undergraduate Council organized a bus trip to Washington, D.C. to take part in National Student Lobbying Day.

Only seven Harvard undergraduates showed up to fill the 25 available seats.

And that April, Boston-area colleges, including Harvard, tried to organize a Week of Resistance to oppose the Solomon Amendment. Harvard planned to host a debate on the law, but it was canceled because the law’s architect, Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon, did not attend.

Even when the activism gained more traction, it never involved large number of students because Harvard’s administration made overtures to those affected by the Solomon Amendment.

Brian R. Melendez ’86 said the University was willing to work with students, and was “really sympathetic to our position” after the Undergraduate Council passed a resolution urging the College to provide replacement financial aid for students who did not register for the draft.

The College responded with an increase in aid to the affected students, but not necessarily a dollar-for-dollar replacement.

The move seemed to placate most students: a 1983 Crimson survey of 127 male undergraduates that asked whether universities should provide aid to students who do not register for the draft found that 65 percent thought Harvard’s proposal of offering loans and extra employment was an adequate response to the amendment.

AN EVER-PRESENT ISSUE

As the reasons for the military’s tense relationship with Harvard and other universities changed in subsequent years, so too did the provisions of the Solomon Amendment.

By the early 1990s, a new generation of students with more distant memories of Vietnam took in stride draft registration as a condition for receiving federal financial aid.

But opposition to the military’s presence on campus remained strong, largely due to the Pentagon’s discriminatory position on gay servicemembers.

Before 1993, gay and lesbian individuals were not permitted to serve in the military, while under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that was enacted that year (and is still in place today) gay soldiers can participate in military service as long as they are not open.

The new conservative majorities in Congress following the “Republican Revolution” strengthened the law in 1995 to allow the Department of Defense to deny federal funding to institutions that did not permit military access to their campuses.

The next year, the law was expanded to cover federal funding from the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services (HHS). (For Harvard, HHS is all important as the vast majority of the University’s $400 million in annual federal funding is channeled through the National Institutes of Health, a part of the HHS.)

While Representative Barney Frank ’62, a Democrat from Newton, Mass. who is one of the nation’s most prominent openly-gay politicians, pushed through a revision to the Solomon Amendment in 1999 that exempted financial aid funding from the monies that the government could deny, Congress strengthened the law again in 2002 by decreeing that the entire university could lose its federal funds if one of its constituent schools did not comply with the amendment’s requirements.

Though many universities joined a consortium to challenge the law’s constitutionality soon after, the writing on the walls became clear when the Supreme Court rebuffed the challenge unanimously in 2006.

And so last fall, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan issued a statement explaining that because 15 percent of Harvard’s operating budget comes from federal funds—most of it to Harvard Medical School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—the Law School would make an exception to its non-discrimination policy.

Allowing military recruiters access to its career placement services, Kagan said, was the only way to make sure that the Law School would not jeopardize funding for the rest of the University.

—Staff writer Cheslea L. Shover can be reached at clshover@fas.harvard.edu.