Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 9, 1990 TAG: 9004090309
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Support of VMI's educational method and mission is the purpose of the foundation, the reason for its existence and the object of its fund-raising activities," say papers filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Roanoke.
"That method and mission would be fundamentally changed . . . if VMI were required to change its admissions policy," the attorneys wrote. "Likewise, the foundation's purpose would be impaired and its activities adversely affected."
The foundation's attorneys - who come from some of the most influential law firms in the Southeast - filed the papers in response to a Justice Department motion that claims the foundation has no standing in whether Virginia Military Institute remains for men only.
The VMI endowment is the largest per student of any public college in the country. Some 55 percent of the school's 11,000 alumni contribute annually to the foundation, which in fiscal year 1989-90 supplied 15.6 percent of VMI's $25 million operating budget.
The papers also asked the court to consolidate the three VMI suits - those filed by the foundation and the state against the Justice Department as well as Justice's suit against VMI - because all seek to determine one thing: whether the school's admissions policy is constitutional.
Last month, the Justice Department filed a sex-discrimination suit against the 150-year-old military school, saying its admissions policy violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But attorneys for the foundation and state Attorney General Mary Sue Terry contend the policy is legal, that opening the school to women would narrow the diversity of Virginia's system of higher education and that the single-sex policy is protected by Title IX of the Education Act Amendments of 1972.
Title IX "exempts from its general prohibition of discrimination . . . the admissions policies of undergraduate institutions `that traditionally and continually from their establishment had a policy of admitting only students of one sex,' " say the papers filed Friday.
Two months ago, Terry said the state's effort to maintain VMI's all-male status could be damaged by the foundation's lawsuit. She maintained that the state's and the foundation's suits "are fundamentally incompatible arguments and they both can't succeed."
But Anne Whittemore, whose Richmond firm is one of the three representing the foundation, characterized the two lawsuits "as being supportive of each other's position. Certainly that was our intention in filing our complaint.
"We are both arguing [for] diversity within the system. The complaints read somewhat differently; there is different articulation of diversity," she said. "We are both asking the court to render the same conclusion."
William Poff, a Roanoke lawyer who also represents the foundation, said Sunday that the consolidation of the three suits likely would ease Terry's concern that the suits defending VMI are incompatible.
by CNB