
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 16, 1991                   TAG: 9104160530
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

VMI/ COURT BATTLE, COEDUCATION WAR

IF POLITICS makes strange bedfellows, lawsuits seem to produce strange comments. Take, for example, the recent U.S. District Court trial in Roanoke regarding the fate of Virginia Military Institute's males-only admissions policy.

One odd comment came in the opening argument of Robert Patterson, a Richmond lawyer and VMI alumnus defending the school. " `The United States against VMI' strikes a chord in my soul," he said. "Always before, it has been VMI and the United States."

Well, not quite always.

In the unpleasantness that some call the Civil War, others the War Between the States, VMI contributed Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and many others to a Confederate army in rebellion against the United States. Among the others were the 257 young cadets who marched on May 15, 1864, to New Market, where they helped Confederate resisters overrun the lines of a larger Union force advancing south toward Staunton.

Since then, of course, VMI has contributed many leaders, including George C. Marshall, to the military service of the United States. Still, you'd think Patterson would have remembered the time when VMI men fought the United States. A statue of Jackson and a memorial to the cadets who fell at New Market are campus landmarks.

Another curious remark, though not part of the official proceedings, came from state Sen. Elmon Gray, the General Assembly's only VMI alumnus and an observer at the trial. Gray chairs the Senate's Education and Health Committee, which killed legislation to make VMI coeducational.

The issue should be decided in court, Gray told a reporter. "This is where it belongs."

If Gray were a Northern Virginia liberal, such reliance on the courts to set the admissions policies of a state institution might be expected. But Gray is a generally conservative Southside Virginian, of a kind historically hostile to intrusions by the federal judiciary.

Pragmatism, though, can fuzz principle - and at the moment, it's in the interest of the anti-coeducation forces to portray the courts as the proper forum for a decision.

During legislative debate, VMI supporters suggested that the admissions policy shouldn't even be considered in Richmond - because it was in litigation. There is, moreover, the chance that VMI might win in court.

If it loses the court battle, it loses the coeducation war anyway. But if the constitutionality of an all-male VMI is upheld, the General Assembly wouldn't be barred from changing the policy on its own. If VMI wins the immediate battle, arguing that the courts were the proper forum for the decision could prove a strategy to avoid losing the war.

by CNB