WHEN DID IT START—ACADEMIA’S HATRED OF THE MILITARY?
by William Perry Pendley
Summary Judgment
December 1, 2005
In The Scariest Place in the World: A Marine Returns to North Korea, James Brady tells of the men with whom he served in “the forgotten war.” “Korea was just maybe the last war Americans fought in which everyone went, the rich and the poor, the Harvards and the high school dropouts, the cowboy and the rancher’s son…” Brady’s fellow lieutenants were “[w]ell-bred college boys” from Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, and Princeton; his company commander was blue-blood John Chafee.
Brady identifies Chafee as the hero of The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea and the inspiration for the protagonist in The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War, and Brady ends The Scariest Place with a eulogy to Chafee. No wonder. At Yale on December 7, 1941, Chafee enlisted and fought as a private on Guadalcanal; in the Marine Corps’ last battle of WWII, Okinawa, Chafee was fighting as a 2nd Lieutenant. He returned to Yale, graduated, graduated from Harvard Law, passed the bar, and entered law practice. In 1950, the Marine Corps called up the reserves, including Captain Chafee.
After Korea, Chafee returned to his law practice, was elected to Rhode Island’s House of Representatives, became Governor, was Secretary of the Navy, and served 23 years in the U.S. Senate. It was a different time. Compare, for example, another Secretary of the Navy, James Webb, who entered law school 25 years after Chafee.
When Webb, a highly decorated combat Marine Captain medically discharged due to his wounds from Vietnam, arrived at Georgetown Law School in 1972, he was stunned at the “disdain that many of the advantaged in my generation felt for those who had fought in Vietnam….” There was a reason. Of the 1,800 students, Webb met three combat veterans. Law professors engaged daily in a condescending harangue of things military. One professor, knowing of Webb’s experiences, gave him a test question about Marine platoon sergeant “Jack Webb,” who smuggled jade in the bodies of dead Marines. Webb reported the professor, arguing he “lacked the judgment to teach at such a prestigious school.” “If such a fact pattern had been written after World War II,” says Webb, “the professor would have been drawn and quartered, probably by the students themselves.” At Harvard in 1947, Chafee would have led the detail. Webb’s professor was given tenure!
This cultural shift and the resulting cultural schism is why the U.S. Supreme Court, on December 6, will hear arguments on the constitutionality of a federal statute that denies universities federal funds if they refuse military recruiters access granted other employers. In November 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, by 2-1, held the “Solomon Amendment” unconstitutional, siding with elite law schools that wish to bar military recruiters purportedly due to Congress’ “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Although attorneys arguing the case will discuss freedom of speech and association, Congress’ war powers, “compelled speech,” Congress’ ability to condition grants, and contract law, the case is about class hatred: that of law schools and their professors for the military and those who wear the uniform. It is also a case filled with irony: law schools discriminate racially to ensure “classroom diversity” but object to the military’s need to assure unit cohesion; law professors, who rant from their podiums throughout the academic year, oppose the one-day-a-semester presence of military recruiters; law schools, weeks from pronouncing their seniors ready to practice law, argue that they are unable to discern whether the military is an ethical employer; and law professors, who demand the right to speak, deny law students the ability to hear the speech of military recruiters.
What the Supreme Court will do is anyone’s guess; however, the dissenting judge from the Third Circuit, a Marine who served in the Pacific, spoke for most Americans when he wrote, “men and women in uniform” are “heroes” who bring credit to the nation’s campuses.
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