College administrators feign lofty ethics by rebuffing military recruiters from their campuses. Just don't ask them to apply those principles to their own pursuit of military money.

Spurning the custom of relying on the body politic or elected officials to create law, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals opted to go the oligarchic route. The judges usurped the law-making function for themselves in declaring unconstitutional the government's witholding of tax funds for universities that ban military recruiters. In other words, the court claimed that somewhere in the Constitution it states that the federal government must subsidize institutions that hate its armed forces.

The case focused on law schools, but is likely to be applied to any academic institution. Within hours of the decision, Harvard Law School announced that it will reinstitute its ban on military recruiters.

Admission: I've been intimately involved in this issue for a decade. I lobbied Congressman Richard Pombo's staff in the mid-'90s to prohibit Department of Defense payouts to institutions of higher learning that banned the Reserve Officer Training Corps from campus. In the debate that led to Pombo's amendment passing, Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston read on the floor of the House of Representatives from an article I had penned in Human Events about Ivy League schools banning ROTC opportunities for students but greedily grabbing millions in funding for themselves in DoD research grants and contracts.

As one who spent eight years in the Marine Reserves, my minor role in getting this important piece of legislation passed was quite gratifying. Seeing a court, rather than Congress itself, repeal such legislation is quite infuriating. By what right?

The issue is pretty simple: just as any private entity should be free to ban military recruiters from their premises, the military should be free to ban its money from bankrolling institutions that ban their personnel. Just as there is nothing in the Constitution that compels Harvard to allow ROTC or military recruiters on their campus, their is nothing in the Constitution that compels the military to unconditionally subsidize Harvard.

In the 1960s, faculty and administrators pointed to the Vietnam war as the justification for kicking-off military recruiters and ROTC from campus. Today, school officials cite the ban on open homosexuals serving in the military. Ten years from now, they'll invent some new chain of reasoning for their stance. While the rationalizations of academics may change, their underlying motivation remains constant: they hate the military.

How can you love the military and hate the Iraq War? We are there at least in part because the military generally likes whatever war they get thrown into. And the military is simply large enough that we can afford to send troops almost everywhere.

I'm betting this one goes to the Supreme Court and gets reversed.

That's unlikely. How is it again that the government is forced to sponsor a university that "hates the millitary"? Even if Harvard really hated the millitary (doubtful), the government has nothing to do with Harvard anyway. Harvard is a private college (the richest in the world and can do what it wants. Not only that, but even public universities get theit money from STATE governments, not the federal government which funds the millitary. I dunno what you're thinking here man. Sure the feds provide schlorships and research money but that is based on the merits of the individual student and project. Should the government really demand special treatment just because some poor kids can't afford tuition? Please.