Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311210183
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Pictured on the front, arms crossed against her tailored white blouse, is college President Cynthia H. Tyson.
In a note to her readers, who include parents and alumni, she speaks of the exciting challenge now permeating the halls of the eggshell-colored brick buildings on campus.
Tyson does not mention Virginia Military Institute and the legal battle to integrate women into its Corps of Cadets. That comes soon enough - on the next page, in fact, where questions about the case are answered - but that's not the point. The point is that Tyson looks way beyond VMI's legal skirmishes when she discusses what is popularly called "the Mary Baldwin plan."
She sees an opportunity to start a new leadership program that eventually could help put women in high places in government and business.
On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department filed its legal opposition to the plan put forward by VMI as its alternative to admitting women to the college, saying it "perpetuates gender stereotypes." Others have said the plan is just a bailout for the public, all-male military school.
Tyson declines comment on the litigation, and distances her college from the fray when she talks about the program planning under way. Mary Baldwin had been discussing, internally, plans for a new leadership program when the "serendipitous" VMI connection was made, she said.
Still, VMI's legal maneuvering already is being felt on campus with receipt of $50,000, the first installment of up to $450,000 in program planning money from the private VMI Foundation. Every four months, the private women's college can expect $50,000 more. If widely held predictions that the VMI case will drag on at least two more years are correct, Mary Baldwin comes out of this with no less than $300,000 to put together a new program that's getting publicity money can't buy.
From the pages of The Washington Post to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the high-profile VMI case and its proposal to provide public, single-sex leadership training for women through Mary Baldwin is being debated.
Mary Baldwin gets all that - even if VMI loses.
Plans for the leadership institute were filed in September by VMI lawyers with the blessing of Gov. Douglas Wilder. They're hoping it meets one of four appeals court solutions to redress VMI's unconstitutional, all-male admissions policy.
Court papers propose that women in this separate-but-equal program choose a Mary Baldwin major, enroll in ROTC, take a rigorous physical education component and study a curriculum of leadership-style classes. The private VMI Foundation will endow the program with $6.9 million.
Leadership students also would be eligible for state ROTC scholarships given to cadets at VMI and Virginia Tech. Last year, those were $5,600 for VMI cadets.
Meantime, the Justice Department, which brought the original suit against VMI's all-male admissions policy, still insists that VMI admit women. Hearings begin in January.
Will the plan pass muster?
"Obviously, I want a positive outcome," said Tyson, whose school is among several women's colleges that see the case against VMI as a legal threat to single-sex education.
But even if she has to do it without the private foundation money, "Mary Baldwin College will offer a leadership program, because it's the right thing to do," said Tyson, former vice president for academic affairs at Queens College in Charlotte, N.C., a one-time women's college that has gone coed.
Her words came at the end of an impassioned speech in support of women's colleges.
"[The students'] role models are women. Their professors support women. In a single-sex environment, every question must be answered by women," said Tyson, now in her ninth year as college president. She also is Staunton's Rotary Club president.
Studies from the Washington D.C.-based Women's College Coalition showed that graduates of women's colleges are more likely than other women to attain leadership positions. In 1990, 12 of 31 women members of Congress and one-third of 4,000 highly paid women officers in Fortune 500 companies were graduates of women's colleges. Only 2 percent to 3 percent of women go to these schools.
Mary Baldwin, said Tyson, always has produced leaders.
Then why does the 1,500-student college need a separate program?
"I'm rather unclear myself," said Jadwiga S. Sebrechts, executive director of the coalition. "Women's colleges see their whole mission as [one] that inculcates and trains and instills those sorts of skills and attitudes."
As a result, the Mary Baldwin plan drew hot debate at the coalition's annual meeting in September, held just after the plan was filed with the courts. The irony was lost on no one, because, after all, the Justice Department brought the suit maintaining that VMI's admissions policy violates women's equal protection rights under the Constitution.
"There was a perception that although Mary Baldwin was making a decision it thought best for its own financial and programming reasons, it was in fact doing something that was abetting an institution that has as its clear motivation the continued exclusion of women," Sebrechts said.
Although Mary Baldwin's enrollment this year is higher than ever, there's no denying the financial benefit if VMI wins.
"It has the potential for increasing student enrollment and for raising funds from the private sector," said Dane Cox, vice president for business and finance at Mary Baldwin.
Costs are rising. Tuition and board are up to $17,700.
"Endowed funds are a predictable, constant source of revenue, and the principal cannot be invaded," Cox said. "That's very attractive to any college or university."
Sebrechts can understand that.
"Private institutions these days are very, very hard-pressed to keep their tuitions down, to remain accessible to a larger cross-section of society. It's not that I find it so ignoble, but I do think there comes a point that you jeopardize your mission by the choices you make, and that could be the problem here," she said.
Women's leadership in academia tends to take the form of research institutes, said Faith Gabelnick, provost and dean of the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
"They bring scholars on campus to talk about women's leadership, or they have to do with public policy," she said.
But Paul T. Mitchell, president of Columbia College of South Carolina, is gambling that training students to be leaders will be standard campus fare within a decade.
"We need to prepare young people to be leaders for the future," Mitchell said. "If we don't get a common understanding of what leadership is, we're going to have demagogues twisting and turning this country based upon volatile, single issues. That's dangerous."
His small, private women's school instituted a minor in leadership studies this fall that includes an initial evaluation - including physical - and classes such as public speaking and evaluating U.S. presidents. Paramount are internships, where students gain practical experience in government or business.
Such a model may be debated at Mary Baldwin, where a task force has started to talk about its new program. Members are mindful of the upcoming January court date, and will submit whatever they have completed to see if they've come up with a suitable women's alternative to the VMI program.
But the case does not dictate their progress.
"Nobody's coming in from legal counsel and secretly advising us," said task force member Gordon Bowen, an associate professor of political science. "The planning of curriculum at a college has to be done by the faculty."
And the task force may or may not follow the plan filed in court, said member Virginia Francisco, a theater professor.
Courses could include an examination of women's styles of leadership, she said. Innovative teaching styles might be used, Bowen said. One example is a technique wherein students study, then re-enact, historic moments such as a decision to go to war.
Mary Baldwin students are mixed over the leadership plan - why the school should have it and what it should offer.
"A more feminist curriculum?" suggested Carrie Burke, a co-editor of Campus Comments, the student newspaper. "I wouldn't consider this a very feminist campus."
"If you're going to create leaders, people have got to start speaking out. Our campus isn't very good about that," Burke said.
Stung by news reports that greeted the plan's September announcement, students were reticent to speak at all about VMI and the proposed leadership program.
"We already have a lot of leadership around here," said Melissa Douglas, a junior from Richmond. "Here, when [students] ask a question, the only person who answers is a woman. When women get out in the real world, they're not afraid to speak their opinion."
So why the Virginia Women's Leadership Institute and its constitutional test in court?
"It's the money," sophomore Laura-Anne Watters said. "A lot of people would agree."
by CNB