Each quarter, the military sends information about scholarship opportunities through email to many students who never requested it. What these students may not know is that, by law, the Registrar’s Office must release student names and email addresses to military recruiters.

Because of the Solomon Amendment, passed in 1996, institutions of higher education that accept federal grants must also allow military recruitment on campus. Although many schools claim the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy violates their anti-discriminatory recruitment policies, the Solomon Amendment was affirmed in a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 2006.

In addition to allowing military recruiters on campus, all federally funded universities, including Stanford, are required to provide information about students — including addresses, telephone listings, date and place of birth and academic majors — to the military.

“This federal law requires that once a quarter, if requested, each branch of the military can ask for the names and contact information for enrolled students, and we legally are required to give it,” said Associate University Registrar Jackie Charonis.

The Registrar’s Office makes exceptions for students who request blocks on this information. In such cases, however, no information about the student can be released, not even to a prospective employer calling to confirm a student’s status.

An Army recruiter, who wished to remain anonymous due to a policy prohibiting interviews with the press, said he and his colleagues try to reach students at least three times each year.

“We try to send [emails] to most of the juniors and seniors, usually at the beginning of the year, the middle of the year and again at the end of the year,” he said.

The recruiter said he uses the information given to speculate whether specific students might be interested in the scholarships.

“The degrees don’t say pre-med, pre-dental, pre-vet, but [for] students studying, say, math or the hard sciences, we’ll email all those seniors and juniors,” he said. “We are only allowed to send information concerning scholarships to students. We do not ‘target’ students — we look at a student’s major and send information that may be used for continuing education.”

Though both are knowledgeable about the Solomon Amendment and its implications, neither Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School, nor Law Prof. Richard Ford had heard of this particular policy.

Kramer emphasized that the distribution of student email addresses is certainly constitutional.

“Especially if students can opt out, it’s hard to see that there’s much basis for legal objection,” he said. “If the University has raised the cost of opting out, saying it’s all or nothing, it seems there’s an easy solution. Students who don’t want to share their information with the military should be able to tell the Registrar: ‘If X calls, you should be able to share my information with X.’ Then nobody has any objections.”

The recruiter said that if students say they do not want to be contacted, they are removed from the list and should not receive any more emails from military recruiters.

Jeff Ma ‘08, however, said he had emailed recruiters telling them to take him off the list, but continues to receive emails, albeit from different recruiters.

“It’s more of a nuisance than an actual problem,” Ma said. “I just ignore them.”

Douglas Stanford ‘09, a physics major, said he has received recruiting emails from at least three different recruiters since sophomore year. Stanford said he understood the University’s obligation to comply with federal law in order to receive funding, but still thought the policy was “pretty weird.”

“If, say, Yahoo or something gives money to Stanford, it would be really bizarre if in exchange Stanford gave email addresses to Yahoo recruiters,” he said. “I don’t think it makes the situation qualitatively different just because it’s the federal government.”

Charonis said that student information is never distributed in a list format, except when it is distributed to the military. Rather, individuals seeking directory information must request information about a particular student. Students can control what information is released via the privacy settings on Axess; however, they cannot control to whom the information is released unless they block out their information entirely.

“We’re really protective and we would only do things if [they were] mandated by federal law,” Charonis said. “We get lots of requests for information and we say no all the time.”