Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 6, 1990 TAG: 9004060712
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Medium
But there is no longing for beautification, nor certainly for that elusive thing called "a woman's touch." VMI is one of the last two all-male public colleges in the country. This spring, the school that was burned by the Yankees once is under siege from Washington again.
The Justice Department has charged VMI with sex discrimination. The publicly funded institute, they submit, cannot deny admission to a female. In self-defense, the VMI brigade of cadets and alumni have taken to the field like their famous ancestors who fought for the Confederacy at New Market. Lost causes are not new here.
Yet on this glorious spring day, VMI feels less a threat to women's rights than an anachronism. This case seems less a cause than a mopping-up operation. Even the cadet assigned to be my guide - not one of the undergraduates who harbors a "Better Dead than Coed" T-shirt - calls VMI "backward." Then he corrects himself and uses the word "traditional."
Gen. John Knapp, the slight, gentlemanly superintendent of VMI, crisp in his uniform and his spit-and-polished black shoes, is too sophisticated to build his case against change on the grounds that women cannot perform. Women have proved themselves in West Point and even Panama.
He and the alumni rather base their claims on other values. The words that I hear repeatedly this morning are "diversity" and even "equality" - words and values that sound both familiar and out of context. Diversity and equality were the watchwords of civil-rights lawyers pressing to open all-white, all-male institutions. Are they now so universally accepted that they can be used perversely to argue for exclusion?
"The argument is diversity and the validity of single-sex education," says Gen. Knapp as we talk. He believes that within the Virginia college system there is room for all-male as well as all-female and coed colleges. He calls this choice.
As for VMI's uniqueness? "We have an intense system of egalitarian treatment," he says. When I blanch, he explains that here, through "fierce" treatment, "young men are stripped of their background and then advance on their own." This barracks democracy is what they believe is threatened by the admission of women.
The "egalitarian" treatment is in fact the institutionalized hazing of new cadets known as the "rat line." It is the brotherhood of rats - from their shaved heads to their servile status in a rigid hierarchy - that arouses the most passion among its former members. They believe that men are made from such humiliation. And women are not.
I don't think that VMI has a legal status to parade on. Its defense rests on shaky ground plowed under in other courts. Indeed, the power of VMI grads in the state is in itself an argument against the exclusion of women from this old-grads network. The wonder is that the first black governor of Virginia has distanced himself without a word and the female attorney general has taken on VMI's defense.
An equality that excludes women and a diversity that ignores an entire gender has little right to cite those values as their own. The private women's colleges can at least claim a lingering role in nurturing women better able to take their place beside men, their way to serve the goal of an equal society. Not so VMI.
What is at stake here is, of course, tradition. But tradition is often the benign face we put over the fear of change even as our traditions themselves change.
Once VMI was exclusively for Virginians. That was the tradition. Once VMI was all-white. That was the tradition. Now it is all male.
Each new group entering an institution makes changes that go beyond the admissions office. It isn't a coincidence that sometime after the first blacks were admitted in 1968, they stopped playing "Dixie" on parade. Women will bring changes to more than the shower room.
When polled, the faculty favored the admission of women by two to one. Gen. Knapp himself has no intention of leading the death march should they lose. He talks about "healing."
It is a shame that this campus can only change by court order. But women will come here as they came to Yale and West Point and neighboring Washington and Lee. And soon, you can count on it, they will become staunch defenders of a new VMI "tradition."
The Boston Globe/Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB