Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991 TAG: 9104050756
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lawyers examined a letter this morning from one of the women interested in attending VMI. The woman's father was in the military, according to Colonel Mark Sandy, VMI's admissions officer.
The school receives about 8,000 inquires a year from men, Sandy said.
Only one in eight students who express a preliminary interest in the school actually file applications, Sandy said under cross-examination. Of those, about 65 percent are accepted and 60 percent of those accepted decide to attend the school. He estimated that fewer than 20 women would have been accepted had VMI been admitting women over the past two years.
When women ask about VMI, "We tell them that our policy is that we do not accept women," Sandy said. "If they are not familiar with the policy, they want to know if we're considering it, if we'll change. I've told them that the policy has not changed."
Attack on that policy began Thursday when a Justice Department lawyer said in opening arguments that only an an unconstitutional admissions policy precludes women from attending VMI.
John R. Moore said the 152-year-old all-male tradition is outdated in a world where women are fighting in the armed services and receiving military educations.
"West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy were not destroyed when they admitted women; nor will VMI be destroyed," Moore said during opening arguments the first day of a federal trial that will determine whether the school's policy violates the 14th Amendment.
"It will still be VMI. It will still be a great school. And, we submit, a better school."
Robert Patterson, a Richmond lawyer and alumnus defending VMI, accused the Justice Department of picking on the small, 1,300-cadet school in the heart of "teeny" Lexington.
The Justice Department filed suit against VMI last year. The only other all-male military institution in the country is The Citadel in South Carolina, whose officials will be closely monitoring this case.
It would be a needless conformity on the government's part to alter - even destroy - VMI by admitting women, Patterson said.
VMI's educational experience has been tested and proven over the years, he said. "One might say single-sex education in itself is on trial here."
Maj. Gen. John Knapp, VMI's superintendent, said the school would have to make a "flurry of changes - physical changes, changes in staff, security and support services" - if the school were to admit women.
But the greatest change, he told the court at the Poff Federal Building in Roanoke, would be that the school would have to accommodate two classes of cadets.
"We would not any longer be able to treat everyone exactly as equal."
When the school first admitted blacks in 1968, there were no changes in the support system, Knapp told Nathaniel Douglas of the Justice Department.
But the school later produced a booklet designed specifically to recruit minority students. "Like other institutions in the state, we were trying to meet objectives for minority enrollment," Knapp said.
One principally black club meets on the post, and the school has two black faculty members. Four women are on the faculty of 90.
Moore said scores of women have shown interest in attending VMI. But Knapp said that only 44 female cadets are enrolled at Virginia Tech, which offers a military education through its ROTC program. Tech has about 500 male cadets.
The commandant for Tech's corps is expected to testify later in the trial, which is scheduled to last through Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser has said it would probably last longer.
If women entered VMI, Knapp said, it would not be the same school that it is today. "You may as well start an all-female academy nearby. . . . It would not be the same system I run now."
Perhaps, Douglas countered, someone else would be able to run it?
Much of the testimony Thursday focused on the method of teaching and of living at VMI.
Witnesses described the spartan rooms shared by three to five cadets. They talked of boot camp and brotherhood, of rigorous workouts and of "rats," or freshmen, "the lowest animals in the world."
The goals of VMI's educational system, in addition to producing citizen soldiers, are to create an environment where there is equality and unity, said Col. N. Michael Bissell, VMI's commandant of cadets.
He described in detail the day when freshmen get to "break out of the rat line," when a hill is flooded with water and the young cadets have to crawl through the mud and rely on each other to get to the top.
And he spoke of the Rat Bible, which contains everything from the school's history to the names of the people who have run it, and from which rats must be able to recite by memory if an upper-classman demands.
At the end of each description, Justice Department lawyer Judith Keith asked Bissell if VMI had determined that a woman couldn't handle that particular facet of the education program.
Each time, he said, "no."
He later added, "But I think it would be a big disruption."
Both U.S. and VMI lawyers agreed that this is a relatively simple case: No one is disputing that VMI refuses to admit women. "The U.S. is simply seeking to enforce the Constitution," Moore said.
For many of the alumni who crowded in the back of the courtroom, the issue has been packed with emotion. Patterson was no exception.
" `The United States against VMI' strikes a chord in my soul," he said, near the end of his opening argument. "Always before, it has been VMI and the United States."
by CNB