Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 5, 1990 TAG: 9004041419
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION:
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES HIGHER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"I know you thought I was coming here to talk about sex, but the [state] attorney general has asked me not to talk about those things," he told the Roanoke Kiwanis Club on Wednesday.
The Justice Department's sex-discrimination lawsuit against the all- Knapp male school, calling its admissions policy illegal and unconstitutional, seems to have given Knapp a ready-made topic - wherever he goes.
At his inauguration last week: What about the women issue? reporters wanted to know. At a long-planned stop at the Kiwanis Club, the news media clamor for another morsel on what the school might do if the court forces VMI to admit women.
One thing is clear: An editorial last week in the Roanoke Times & World-News rankled the general.
"I was wondering how I might be received. You know the old saw, `All I know is what I read in the papers,' " he said, eliciting chuckles and sporadic applause from the audience that included some 15 former cadets.
The editorial, published last Thursday, chastised Knapp for a letter to the 11,000 alumni in which he urged them to "resist the urge `to speak out' " on the admissions controversy.
Otherwise, the letter said, "we might play into the hands of those who would have this become a shrill and meaningless shouting match."
The newspaper called the letter "insulting" to the alumni, Virginia's taxpayers and democracy. Knapp continues to maintain the letter was misconstrued, and said so at his inauguration last week.
He used the Kiwanis gathering to reiterate the state's justification for VMI's all-male admissions - maintaining the "diversity" of the Virginia's system of higher education - and asked publicly for a meeting with the paper's editorial board "to put before them our case."
"That was no gag order," he said of the letter in an interview after his luncheon speech. "It spoke not to those who might speak against the issue, but those who might get [too] emotional" when talking to reporters.
He said he was "dismayed" at the paper's editorial stance, adding, "When it's nearby, I'm all the more dismayed because it would be so easy to talk with them."
In explaining his own reaction to the federal government's assault on the 150-year-old admissions policy, Knapp said: "If you think I'm being unemotional and not standing in the door and waving swords at the world, you're right."
He repeatedly has urged cadets, faculty and staff to avoid making emotion-laden remarks to the electronic and print reporters who have been swarming the Lexington campus the past two months.
The matter, he's now fond of saying, will be decided in the courts and VMI will do what it has taught cadets for the past century and a half: obey the law.
by CNB