Military Recruitment Policy

The nondiscrimination policies of Washburn University and Washburn University School of Law reflect a long-standing commitment to equal opportunity. As adopted by our faculty:

It is the policy of Washburn University School of Law to assure equal educational and employment opportunity to qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, age, national origin, ancestry, disability, gender, sexual orientation, marital status or parental status.

This policy complies with the requirements of the American Bar Association, the law school accrediting body, and the Association of American Law Schools, both of which monitor enforcement of standards. It applies to all programs and services offered by the law school.

Our practice has been to require employers who use our Professional Development Office to certify that they abide by our policy. We do this because we recruit and enroll students based in part on our non-discrimination policies and we wish to assure our students that they will receive equal treatment while enrolled at Washburn. Therefore, we consider it inappropriate to provide services to any employer whom we know to have an affirmative policy of discriminating against certain of our students in violation of our policy. Because the goal of the policy is to encourage compliance with it, we have not been unreasonable or inflexible in its implementation; we use the policy as a tool to educate employers, and we do not prohibit our students from investigating possible employment with employers who do not comply with our policies.

After sexual orientation was added to our non-discrimination policy in 1991, several military employers indicated that they would not be able to comply with our policies because they discriminate on the basis of age, disability and sexual orientation. As a result, from 1992 to 1997, those military employers were not allowed to use the interviewing facilities of the law school, but interviewed students in the University Placement Office. In 1997, however, Congress enacted the Solomon Amendment, which cuts off several types of federal funds to schools denying access to military recruiters. Because loss of the funds at issue would have significantly affected the operation of the law school and could penalize some of our students, as well as other students and departments of the University unrelated to the law school or its policies, we decided to comply with the congressional mandate.

Although we have decided to accommodate the military, the law school faculty also wishes to publicly reaffirm its conviction that employers should not discriminate on the basis of any of the characteristics delineated in our nondiscrimination policy; and that these characteristics have no legitimate relevance to practicing law. As a result, we intend to communicate this message on a regular basis in a manner reasonably calculated to reach the entire law school community.