Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 30, 1990 TAG: 9003300778
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But that respect has been drastically weakened in recent years by VMI's stubborn disregard for the rights of women and its relentless insistance that its way of facing the realities of late-20th century American society are the only way it will meet the future; and it reached rock-bottom last week when I received what I regard as a deeply obnoxious letter, a letter sent all VMI alumni, from newly named VMI Superintendent Maj. Gen. John W. Knapp.
Knapp - as everyone in Virginia knows who has not recently returned from a decade in a Tibetan lamasery - is the official leader, on behalf of the VMI Board of Visitors, of legal resistance to an ultimatum from the United States Department of Justice to open admission to VMI to women, now automatically excluded from VMI as a matter of policy. Knapp has joined with the board, and with Virginia Attorney General Mary Sue Terry, in a vow to fight coeducation at VMI through the courts. They dispute the claim that VMI's single-sex admission policy is unconstitutional and mean to argue it to as high a court as the case can be carried.
That is their right, though I believe it to be a drastically wrong case to defend, and it is the right of Knapp and the board to seek support for their anti-coeducational views wherever they like, especially amongst VMI alumni. But what I object to, and what I hope many other VMI alumni will resent as much as I do, is a paragraph in Knapp's letter urging alumni to remain silent on the issue.
"Every VMI alumnus must resist the urge to `speak out,' " writes Knapp, "because by so doing we might play into the hands of those who would have this become a shrill and meaningless shouting match." But then he goes on to "ask" VMI alumni "to make as clear as possible" the case VMI argues.
It is a poor case, and has been made repeatedly already, but that is not the point here. The point here is that by seeking a gag on alumni comment, by branding discussion of the issue "a shrill and meaningless shouting match," and by urging a VMI party line, Knapp has, no doubt unwittingly, revealed precisely what it is about VMI policy that so troubles many.
Any education worth the name ought to end by encouraging men and women to test their ideas and convictions - especially their opinions on moral, political and social questions - in the cockpit of public discussion. Educated men and women do not resist challenge but welcome it, in and for itself but also because disagreement and debate are a means to reach the truth, on which none of us owns a monopoly. What is fundamentally and offensively wrong about Knapp's letter is that it seeks a monolithic VMI response and urges those who disagree to hold their tongues. That is scarcely the line the president of an educational institution ought to take. It is scarcely the message educated alumni ought to get. It is scarcely the message VMI undergraduates ought to hear. It is a message not of enlightenment but of authoritarianism. It is a message for which Virginians of all colors and classes paid dearly, both morally and financially, when the commonwealth chose, more than 30 years ago, to oppose racial desegregation by "massive resistance."
I regret to have to conclude that VMI does not believe in the principle of free inquiry amongst free and equal people. It seems to believe, instead, that "discipline," which it purports to respect, can only be effectively promoted by fiat and force. By the same token, and in the face of all evidence to the contrary, it appears to believe that only men can achieve discipline, that the presence of women would only diminish that discipline, that in the end only men possess the secret of the disciplined life. Here is one alumnus who disagrees. Somehow I suspect there are more.
by CNB