Not just from Antonin Scalia, and not just from Clarence Thomas; rather, from a unanimous U. S. Supreme Court this week came the juicy rebuke to 36 law schools trying to bar military recruiters from their premises.

The learned justices put the matter more elegantly, not to mention circumspectly, but basically they said to the law schools and law profs demanding to keep our government's recruiters at bay: Can’t you guys read? Or is it that you don't want to?

The implications of the latter question lend poignancy to the case of Rumsfeld vs. Forum for Academic and Institutional Research (FAIR).

The legal factories demanding the right to protect students from exposure to the idea of a career in military justice thumb their noses at mainstreet America. The Supreme Court had to settle this thing? Why couldn't common sense, tinged with some latent affection for our country, have done the job? Because at too many institutions of the higher wisdom you prospect for weeks without striking a vein of common sense. Leftwing ideology -- plenty of that, nevertheless.

FAIR arose from the revulsion that the American Association of Law Schools felt at the notion of seeming to endorse "antigay" discrimination by admitting military recruiters to the campus. After all, the Clinton-era compromise on admission of gays to the military --- don't ask, don't tell -- fell short of according gays unquestioned access to military service. The law schools retaliated. You don't do it our way, they said to the military, you do it someplace else.

I pause for reflection on that one. The instrument of government whose purposes is the defense of the nation couldn't recruit law students inasmuch as law profs saw the military as an instrument of discrimination. Congress intervened via the Solomon amendment, whose present form provides for cutting off federal funds to institutions that try to trammel military recruiters. FAIR objected that such a requirement interfered with its members' freedom of speech.

Replied Chief Justice John Roberts, in behalf of a unanimous court (missing only Justice Sam Alito, who hadn't been confirmed when the case was argued): "Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with every speech by recruiters, and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military policies."

It helps to recall what the Harvard faculty did to its president, Larry Summers, for wondering -- in the course of wondering about the paucity of women scientists -- whether women's minds are formed for science in the same way as men's minds are formed for it. Does anyone know the  answer to that one? I think not. What brought the roof crashing down on Summers' head, and contributed to his eventual demise as president -- was that he had implied the question of sex differences might be worth discussing. Egad! You might have thought he had proposed a School of Creationism Studies, with Pat Robertson as dean. .

Perhaps a few thousand retirements, or funerals, will take care of this particular problem eventually. And perhaps not. It's reassuring meanwhile, as per the Rumsfeld decision, to learn that the academics can push illogic only so far, with any expectation of prevailing. You kind of take what you can get these days, don't you?

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