Harvard lawyers and Pentagon officials have agreed to launch negotiations aimed at resolving a dispute over military recruitment on campus, University President Lawrence H. Summers told an alumni group last month.

The negotiations will center on the 1996 Solomon Amendment, under which the Pentagon has threatened to cut federal funding to universities that limit recruiters’ access to students because of claims that the military discriminates against gays.

In a Dec. 19 letter to Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus President Thomas H. Parry ’74, Summers wrote that instead of joining one of four lawsuits challenging the statute, the University has “in recent weeks secured the agreement of Pentagon officials to enter into discussions” aimed at reconciling conflicting interpretations of the amendment.

Under Harvard Law School (HLS) policy, employers who recruit through the Office of Career Services must sign a pledge stating that they will treat employees equally regardless of sexual orientation. The armed forces’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy mandates the discharge of openly gay service members, and the Pentagon has refused to sign the pledge.

The new talks are not Harvard’s first attempt to negotiate with the Pentagon over its policies.

When HLS was considering reversing its policy against millitary recruiting in the summer of 2002, the school’s administrators met with senior Pentagon officials but concluded that the Defense Department would not allow Harvard to enforce the nondiscrimination policy for military recruiters.

“It’s clear to us that the evaluation was not going to change within the short term,” said Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations, in October 2002.

So the Law School granted the Pentagon an exemption from its nondiscrimination policy.

Gay rights activists on campus question whether the new talks will be more effective than Harvard’s previous attempts to negotiate with the military on this issue.

“It’s basically two-year-old news,” said second-year law student Sam P. Tepperman-Gelfant ’00, academic chair of the students civil rights group HLS Lambda.

“Informally negotiating with the Pentagon is a strategy that Harvard and a lot of other schools attempted when the Pentagon first came down with its interpretation [in 2002],” said Tepperman-Gelfant, who is a former Crimson executive. “It was a strategy that had no results two years ago. I have no reason to believe that it will yield results now.”

Parry also said he doubted that negotiations would prove fruitful.

“As far as Summers trying to solve all this, I hope he can succeed on the course he set for himself,” he said. “I don’t think he’s going to, quite frankly. But maybe he’s got the kind of credibility and persuasive powers with the general counsel of the Defense Department.”

Harvard officials yesterday declined to explain how the newly-announced negotiations would differ from past attempts at compromise.

University General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano ’83 told The Crimson in an e-mail that “discussions with the government are ongoing,” but declined to comment further. And University Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone also declined comment yesterday on whether the discussions Summers announced would be different than previous talks.