ASSOCIATED PRESS, October 22, 1997
Congress Pulls Strings for Military
By KATHERINE RIZZO
      WASHINGTON (AP) - Kenyon College had little to lose when it closed its
campus to military recruiters in 1992 to protest Pentagon rules barring
homosexuals from the armed forces.
      The small, prestigious liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, was
involved in no Pentagon research projects, so it felt no pinch when Congress
voted in 1994 to deny military grants and contracts to colleges that barred
recruiters.
      Recruiting sergeants are back now, however, at Kenyon and scores of
other campuses that once barred them. Congress quietly raised the ante last
year for schools that still kept out the recruiters: they could lose all
their federal student aid.
      ``Eventually, the few remaining schools are going to get the message,''
Rep. Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y., instigator of the penalties, said at the time.
Solomon, chairman of the House Rules Committee and an ex-Marine, also is the
author of a 1982 law that denies student aid to young men who fail to
register with the Selective Service System after turning 18, as they are
required to do by law.
      Kenyon had almost $250,000 at stake in subsidized loans, grants and
work-study funds.
      ``The impact the cuts would have had on our students was unthinkable,''
said Donald J. Omahan, Kenyon's dean of students.
      Melissa Kravetz, 19, co-president of a Kenyon student group called
Allied Sexual Orientations, called it ``blackmail'' but doesn't fault the
college for reversing its stand.
      ``We had to concede,'' she said. ``There was no other option.''
      From a high of 138 campuses, only a handful of institutions are left
where the Pentagon's recruiters remain persona non grata.
      The list has dwindled to a law school in St. Paul, Minn., and 17
colleges and trade schools in Connecticut, where schools can't change
anti-discrimination policies unless the Legislature in Hartford rewrites
state law.
      American University's Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C.,
was also on the Pentagon's list, but it notified the Pentagon just last week
that the recruiters are welcome again.
      The law school did an about-face after attorneys decided that aid to
American's undergraduates as well as its 1,200 law students could be at risk.
      ``It's a very difficult issue to deal with,'' said Harry Haynsworth,
dean of William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. ``It's the kind of thing
people feel strongly about on both sides.''
      The military hasn't recruited at William Mitchell since 1987, but the
law school does refer interested students to the local recruiting office. A
recent class included five graduates who joined the Judge Advocate General's
Corps, Haynsworth said.
      The government has frozen $419,000 in aid that the law school's
students were eligible for this academic year, including work-study funds
that provide stipends for students who clerk at the Minnesota Supreme Court.
      ``Unfortunately, maybe the dollar is more important than the principled
approach,'' said Winnie Stachelberg, political director of the Human Rights
Campaign, a Washington-based gay rights group. ``The price of principle
should be higher than a student's loans.''
      At Kenyon, there was no formal protest of the reappearance of Army
recruiters, although Kravetz and other students stopped by the recruiters'
information table to question the Clinton administration's ``don't ask, don't
tell'' policy that replaced the
traditional outright ban on homosexuals.
      Sgt. 1st Class Alden Byrd told Kenyon's campus newspaper that students
should ``use their energy and intelligence to focus on why the government,
and not the Army, is instituting the policies they disagree with.''
      ``It's so frustrating,'' said Kravetz, a junior from Tarzana, Calif.
``He ran off a list of terrible things you can be discharged for - spousal
abuse, drunken driving, narcotics - and homosexuality was on that list.''