Under both the proposed House and Senate bills, federal financial aid to individual students would not be affected if schools limit ROTC or military recruitment on campus. The original Solomon Amendment would have cut off aid to students whose schools flout the Pentagon’s requests.

Greer called the student aid exemption “a good piece of a bad law.” She said that independent law schools that do not receive federal research money might be more likely to challenge the Pentagon’s policy once the exemption becomes law.

Rogers included the exemption in the March House legislation. Sentaor Edward M. Kennedy ’54, D-Mass., added similar language to the Senate bill during Armed Services Committee deliberations. Kennedy’s office did not return repeated requests for comment over the past four days.

JAG CLEARANCE

Until 2002, Harvard Law School insisted that the Office of the Judge-Advocate General (JAG), the Pentagon’s legal wing, could not use the school’s official recruiting resources unless the military signed the University’s nondiscrimination pledge.

Instead, the Harvard Law School Veterans’ Association served as a conduit between JAG and students.

But in 2002, the Pentagon told then-Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark that the University could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds unless the school gave JAG full access to the school’s resources.

Clark responded by granting JAG an exemption from the school’s nondiscrimination policy.

Harvard officials still say that the Pentagon misinterpreted the Solomon Amendment in 2002.

“It has been our consistent belief that Harvard’s recruiting policies have consistently been in compliance with the Solomon Amendment,” Casey wrote in an e-mail Monday.

According to Casey, the Army sent a letter to Clark in 1998 affirming that the University’s interpretation of the Solomon Amendment was indeed accurate.

In that letter, Army lawyers wrote: “Thank you for providing our military recruiters a degree of access to students that is equal in quality and scope to that afforded to other employers, consistent with regulations.”

Greer said the Pentagon had no need to adopt a stricter interpretation of the Solomon Amendment in 2002.

“There has been no evidence whatsoever that the Defense Department is having difficulty recruiting on campuses, at law schools, or from graduate programs,” she said.

COURT REPORT