Columbia University left itself vulnerable to losing federal grants when a policy-making body of the school opposed this spring the return of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program to campus, according to a congressman from New York City.

Vito Fossella, Republican of Staten Island, told The New York Sun yesterday that Columbia has opened itself up “to being suspended from receiving federal grant money” after the university’s senate rejected a resolution calling for the return of an ROTC detachment to Morningside Heights as soon as possible.

Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, joined 52 other members of the university senate in voting down the resolution. The vote was the culmination of a year-long debate on campus on whether the university ought to invite ROTC back 36 years after expelling a Navy unit during the height of the Vietnam War. Ten members of the senate, which consists of students, faculty members, and administrators, voted for the resolution. The university’s provost, Alan Brinkley, abstained but encouraged members to oppose the resolution in a speech before the vote.

The vote of the university senate is “almost a contemptuous position taken by an institution that espouses every type of freedom imaginable, which I support, but doesn’t recognize sufficiently that those freedoms are preserved by the men and women who wear our nation’s uniforms,” Mr. Fossella said.

He accused Columbia of taking “money from the federal treasury without the willingness to participate in what is essential to the process.”

The senate’s ruling on the ROTC resolution isn’t binding and serves as a policy recommendation for the university’s board of trustees, which has not yet taken a position on establishing an ROTC unit at Columbia.

Columbia was one of six Ivy League schools that expelled ROTC detachments during the Vietnam War. Two of those schools, Dartmouth and Princeton, reinstated their programs in the 1970s, while Columbia and the other three schools allowed students to “cross-enroll” at nearby universities.

While ROTC units were removed in the 1960s in a period of heightened anti-war sentiment on many college campuses, opponents of ROTC at Columbia have cited the government’s ban on openly gay members of the military as their chief reason for not supporting the presence of a detachment.

Mr. Fossella suggested Columbia could be punished under the Solomon Amendment, a federal law that allows the government to cut off grants and contracts to a university that “either prohibits, or in effect prevents,” the military from establishing a ROTC unit. The government may also cut off money if a school prevents the military from recruiting on campus.

Congress originally passed the measure during the Clinton administration, after law schools barred military recruiters, to protest the nation’s “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” prohibition of openly gay members of the military. The Supreme Court said earlier this month that it would hear a case challenging the Solomon Amendment as unconstitutional.

The vote of the Columbia senate is unlikely to trigger an application of the Solomon Amendment at Morningside Heights, because it does not constitute an official policy of the university. In addition, the Department of Defense has not requested that an ROTC detachment be reinstated at Columbia. The department’s deputy director of accession policy, Christopher Arendt, told the Sun “there is no need to invoke the Solomon Amendment because the Department of Defense is not seeking to establish an ROTC unit at Columbia.”

Columbia students who wish to participate in ROTC are able to cross-enroll at Manhattan College and Fordham University, which have detachments. Military officials have been reluctant to support establishing a detachment at Columbia lest it fail to enroll enough students and jeopardize the budgets of ROTC detachments at other New York schools. Nine students at Columbia are enrolled in ROTC at Fordham and Manhattan, according to Columbia officials.

Mr. Fossella told the Sun that lawmakers might be able to work around obstacles in the way of punishing Columbia. “If there is not a legislative mechanism right now, there might be,” he said. He also said he was considering holding a press conference at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus to protest the university senate’s vote.

Columbia received more than $500 million in federal, state, and local government grants between July 2002 and July 2003, according to its tax filings.

The university senate’s vote came after a task force it appointed recommended that Columbia reinstate an ROTC detachment if the government abolished its ban on openly gay soldiers.

In 2003, the Columbia College Student Council sponsored a student poll that found 65% of students supported the return of ROTC on campus.