Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 28, 1991                   TAG: 9103280402
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARGARET CAMLIN CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LEXINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

W&L CHIEF LIFTS RECRUITING BAN/ MILITARY PERMITTED AT LAW SCHOOL

Law professors voted several weeks ago to uphold a policy of the American Association of Law Schools that required its members to amend their anti-discrimination policies to include homosexuals as a protected group.

Employers that discriminate against homosexuals, such as the military, were to be banned from recruiting on campus.

W&L President John D. Wilson did not completely overturn the anti-discrimination policy, but he exempted the military from it.

"It seems to me self-evident that the [association] has adopted a standard that cannot prevail," Wilson said in a statement.

"This is so, not simply because the nation's accredited schools have been divided by it, but because the policy exclusively focuses upon a single employer. . . . The [military] has the force of the law behind the personnel policies it follows."

The U.S. Supreme Court last year upheld the military's ban on homosexuals.

Students who protested the ban on the military were pleased with Wilson's decision.

"We come to law school to study law, not to make some kind of political or moral statement, whether it's right or wrong," said Grant Burns, president of the Student Bar Association. The student association had urged the faculty to rescind the ban.

"We're really happy that this whole matter is put to rest," said Mitch Neurock, a law student and U.S. Air Force officer who had threatened, along with other students, to lobby the board of trustees.

Wilson said the university was suffering "because many of its loyal friends are puzzled and distressed that their university appears to have placed itself in opposition to a lawful agency of the government."

A Richmond lawyer and W&L alumnus, William R. Cogar, ridiculed the faculty's decision in a letter to Law School Dean Randall Bezanson, published recently in the Richmond News-Leader.

Cogar said he intended to urge his law firm to stay off W&L's campus until the ban was lifted. He asked for a list of alumni "for the purpose of mooting the action you have taken."

He wrote: "Will General [Robert E.] Lee's remains, and the recumbent statue, be removed from the campus if the association hereafter concludes that any symbol or remnant of a military heritage offends the sensibilities of homosexuals?

"Is it actually conceivable that the disciplines of our great university have so eroded that a deviate minority now can subordinate the integrity and honor of a proud institution to its perverse sexual orientation?" Cogar wrote.

A News-Leader editorial also attacked the faculty's decision. "When reason goes on holiday at universities, people who support those hallowed halls with their tax dollars, tuition payments or contributions also have a say in the matter if they choose to exercise it," the March 10 editorial said. "That would be . . . in deciding to which colleges they will write checks."

Bezanson said Wednesday that Wilson's decision was "purely a function of the divisiveness with which this rule has been executed within the national law school community."

The ban has not been adopted in a consistent manner, he said.

W&L now has followed the University of Virginia, George Mason University and the College of William and Mary in welcoming military recruiters despite policies that generally ban employers that discriminate against homosexuals.