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

DATE: THURSDAY, April 29, 1993                   TAG: 9304290501
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ALL SINGLE-SEX SCHOOLS AT RISK IN VMI CASE

AS A long-time reader of the Roanoke Times & World-News and a VMI graduate, I have held fire and not written concerning your editorial position on the question of admitting women to Virginia Military Institute. As one who has a great deal of respect for the First Amendment, I believe and expect newspapers to take positions that are different from my positions on various matters. But I believe a good newspaper would respect the right of VMI to fight for the position that it believes is right.

Several of your editorials on this case have indicated that you believe VMI is wrong in pursuing its case to the Supreme Court. By your way of thinking, no one whose position you disagree with should continue its case to the Supreme Court after losing in either the District Court or the Circuit Court of Appeals. If this thinking had been followed by Thurgood Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund, the case of Brown et al vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. (1954) would never have been decided. Of the five cases that were argued at the same time as Brown, only one case, from Delaware, was decided in favor of the plaintiffs (the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) prior to being argued before the Supreme Court.

Despite your beliefs, the question of the legality of publicly supported single-sex education is far from clear. VMI, like any person or group, is entitled to its day in court. Once a final decision is rendered, I expect, as a citizen and a VMI alumnus, that VMI will comply with the ruling.

In your March 28 editorial ("VMI's friends at court"), you indicated that you hoped the Supreme Court would recognize the distinction between public and private education, and not rule that single-sex women's colleges are unconstitutional. I have one problem with a distinction between single-sex public and single-sex private institutions:

If the court does not allow a state to maintain a single-sex public institution in the name of diversity in its public educational system of a state, I do not see how the court can allow, or should allow, single-sex private institutions to exist. If the court allows that to happen, it will be sanctioning an invidious form of discrimination, which will penalize those of economic castes who are unable to afford the tuition to attend a single-sex private institution. What this would say to the common man in the United States is that if you are middle class or poor, you may only attend a homogenous state-supported, coeducational institution. But if you are upper-middle class or upper class, you have more rights because you can afford to pay to go to a private single-sex institution. This would ration constitutional rights, depending on the ability of an individual to purchase or buy rights. To deny these rights to a great portion of the college-age population of the United States who cannot afford to attend private institutions is, in my mind, a clear denial of equal opportunity and clearly goes against our constitutional heritage.

If publicly supported single-sex educational institutions cannot exist under our constitutional system, I can see no constitutional justification for private single-sex institutions. HENRY J. FORESMAN JR. LEXINGTON

by CNB