Wow, that brown shirt…

…really goes with your peace symbol.

Pamela Leavey offers this newswithout comment at The Democratic Daily, but I've got to register strong disapproval of the strong arm tactics of the these UC Santa Cruz students…

Military recruiters were driven off campus from a job fair Tuesday morning at UC Santa Cruz. Four military recruiters hastily fled the job fair after a “raucous crowd of student protesters blocked an entrance to the building where the Army and National Guard had set up information tables.”

Right off the bat, my civil libertarian knee starts to jerk. Has the 1st Amendment been suspended at UC Santa Cruz? Not just for the folks in uniform, but for anyone who might, for any reason, want to talk to them? Is there a process for approval, some kind of Students Against War authorization for speech? Or are there just some things that can't be said on the grounds of that public institution by anyone?

Of course, that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to stop the war and stuff...

“We’re saying it’s not OK to recruit on high school campuses, it’s not OK to recruit on university campuses,'’ Marla Zubel, a UC Santa Cruz senior and member of Students Against War, said. “In order to stop the war, you have to make it more difficult to wage war.”

Since this is a college campus, the high school campus remark is a straw man, perhaps, though, a worthy subject for a separate rant. But no, this is a college campus. As college campuses go, UC Santa Cruz is an improbable field for a military recruiter to work, unless I missed the introduction of vegan mess halls and the suspension of random UA's. Still, if they think it's worth their while, they've got a right.

Beyond that, though, it's just silly to think that by kicking the recruiters out of the hallowed halls of academe they've somehow thrown a body blow to the war machine. The more likely outcome of making college campuses less accessible to the military will be a greater concentration of those for whom college is out of reach economically (an ever expanding category given the Buscho™ cuts in financial aid) in the Armed Forces. They could be, joined, perhaps, by others admitted under yet another drop in the standards to absorb those for whom college is out of reach academically.

There will be an Army. It may be better or less educated. It may be broadly representative of the American people, or drawn from a pool defined by class lines. But there will be an Army, though if the UCSC thought police have their way, the soldiers will have one less freedom to protect.