[Peace-discuss] recruitment

[Susan Davis]

Lies Military Recruiters Tell

By RON JACOBS

Recently, most students at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington 
received an email with the heading ARMY PAYS OFF STUDENT LOANS in their 
university email box. The general message of the mass mailing was that if a 
student was nearing graduation and wondering how they were going to pay off 
the massive debt today's US college students incur, they should join the 
army. In essence, this email was a college student's version of the poverty 
draft that entraps so many working class and poor young people into 
enlisting in the service. The sender was a military recruiter working out 
of the US Army recruitment office in the Burlington suburb of Williston. 
Given that the university has a very clear policy forbidding these types of 
solicitations on their email servers one wonders how the recruiting office 
was able to obtain the address list. The university administration has been 
reticent when asked this question by various faculty, students, and 
parents. It is fair to assume, however, that the email list was released to 
the recruiter under the compliance sections of the so-called Solomon 
Amendment. For those unfamiliar with this legislation, it essentially 
forbids Department of Defense (DOD) funding of schools unless those schools 
provide military representatives access to their students for recruiting 
purposes. It is this same law that enables military recruiters to set up 
shop in high schools across the US and to call students at their homes 
attempting to entice them into joining the military.

At UVM, this email was met with anger and questions, and probably even a 
few inquiries. The anger is now being organized into a drive to keep 
military recruiters off the university campus and out of the students' 
private communications. There is a petition campaign underway that demands 
that no recruiters for the regular military or the Vermont National Guard 
be allowed recruit on campus. Despite this, recruiters do show up 
unannounced on campus. One assumes that their strategy is designed to 
prevent student organizers from organizing protests against the recruiters' 
presence. In 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841678/counterpunchmaga>
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addition, there is organizing underway to organize some kind of response to 
the military and Guard's presence at the University's Spring Career Day on 
March 8th. (This career day is also the host to recruiters from various 
corporations from the war industry-General Dynamics foremost among them) 
Here in Vermont, the Guard recruitment hits close to home, since the state 
ranks near the top in the number of deaths per capita in Iraq. The 
likelihood of the university denying these recruiters access is slim, 
especially in light of the mass email, yet the students involved continue 
on undaunted. If the petition campaign fails to produce the results they 
desire, there will likely be some kind of protest.

Other college campuses have already experienced such protests. On January 
20, 2005, several hundred students at Seattle Central Community College 
chased army recruiters from their spot in the Student center. On February 
23, campus police arrested a woman student during a picket in front of the 
military's recruitment table at a job fair at the University of 
Wisconsin-Madison. A couple days before that, several dozen students chased 
military recruiters off campus at Southern Connecticut State University 
(SCSU). In September 2004, more than a hundred students protested the 
presence of military recruiters at the University of Pennsylvania. On 
February 22, 2005 several dozen students picketed recruiters at the 
University of Illinois campus in Chicago. At the USC Law School, recruiters 
were met with pickets and leafleters demanding that they leave, and at UC 
Berkeley, a couple dozen students protested the presence of a military 
recruiter table there. These are but a few of the dozens of protests that 
have taken place.

Meanwhile, in high schools across the US, more students and their parents 
seem to be opting out of taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude 
Battery (ASVAB), a test given to high school juniors as a method of 
targeting potential recruits. It is an admissions and placement test for 
the US military. All persons enlisting in the US military are required to 
take the ASVAB. Although the military does not usually start turning up the 
pressure to join the military until students reach their senior year, about 
14,000 high schools nationwide give this test to juniors. A recent piece in 
the Boston Globe detailed the troubles one recruiting office in New 
Hampshire is facing this year. According to ASVAB testing coordinator at 
the Military Entrance Processing Station in Boston, which handles 
enlistment processing for Rhode Island, much of New Hampshire and parts of 
Massachusetts, many parents are writing notes excusing their kids from 
taking the test. At one high school in Nashua, NH, school administrators 
opted out of even administering the test this year. This is not an isolated 
case either; of the thirty schools in the Boston region that administered 
the test in 2004, only nineteen signed up to do so this year. One wonders 
how long it will be before the military makes the test mandatory for 
graduation.

Campus antiwar groups that formed in the past three years have called most 
of the university and college protests. In addition, lesbian and gay 
organizations and individuals have joined in because of their opposition to 
the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality. Of course, 
many of the latter group also opposes the war in Iraq. According to a 
federal appeals court ruling made in November 2004, the essentially 
anti-gay policies of the military do allow universities to deny its 
recruiter's access to their students and property. On top of that ruling, 
another federal judge in Connecticut found that the government 
unconstitutionally applied the Solomon Amendment after Yale Law School 
faculty sued Donald Rumsfeld when he attempted to deny federal funds to 
Yale because it prevented military recruitment on its campus. Yale denied 
the recruiters access because of their discriminatory policies against gays 
and lesbians.

While this strategy is not necessarily the best political strategy possible 
to chase recruiters off campus, it is a legal tool counter-recruitment 
activists should utilize while it exists. In my mind, the best political 
strategy is one that challenges the imperial policies of the US and calls 
into question not just the military's discriminatory recruitment policies, 
but also the role of the military itself. A strategy based on this premise 
would not only diminish the military's visibility, it would also challenge 
young people (and the rest of us) to examine for whom and what the military 
really fights. Additionally, it would allow the organizers of these 
campaigns to include defense contractors in their campaign. After all, it 
is these corporations that truly need young men and women to go to war.

A list of links providing information and avenues of action around this 
issue can be found here: 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/http://www.groups.yahoo.com/groups/militaryrecruitment/links>www.groups.yahoo.com/groups/militaryrecruitment/links