Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 13, 1994 TAG: 9403150154
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But imagining that VMI would be better for changes wrought by coeducation is easy.
That, after all, is what the marketplace has been saying for years about men-only colleges. (And about men-only businesses, and governments, and social organizations ... and the military.)
The court case over VMI's all-male admissions policy has, understandably, focused on the constitutionality of the state's offering a single-sex education for men but not for women.
But the more pertinent question, if not of constitutional law then of common sense, might be: Why does the state bother to offer a single-sex education for men, period?
In higher education's private sector, which must understand the marketplace or die, it isn't men's but women's colleges that continue to thrive.
True, many erstwhile women's colleges have died. Others have gone fully coed. But Mary Baldwin College - which, under the keep-VMI-as-it-is plan, would house a state-supported leadership program for women - is just one of dozens that are both alive and all-women. Others include Hollins College in the Roanoke Valley, and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon Woman's colleges on the other side of the Blue Ridge.
For them, there's a demand.
By contrast, private-sector men's colleges are extinct, or nearly so, and have been for years. When VMI's next-door neighbor, private Washington and Lee University, began admitting women to its undergraduate programs nearly a decade ago, it was among the last of the formerly men's schools to do so.
The nation's oldest private-sector military college, Norwich University in Vermont, has been coeducational since 1972.
Among the surviving all-male colleges is Hampden-Sydney near Farmville. Another is Wabash College in Indiana. Another is ... well, in the private sector, that's pretty much it.
VMI is a survivor, too. But VMI - like its closest analogue, the Citadel in South Carolina - depends on public subsidies to stay afloat. To the tune of $5,500 per cadet per annum, not to mention the state's portion of capital outlays past and present, we Virginia taxpayers have the dubious - and involuntary - pleasure of helping make sure the rat line stays ratty, the uniforms uniform, and the male-bonded males well-bonded throughout this life and, for all I know, the hereafter as well.
Maybe an all-male VMI could survive as a private institution, buying out the state's equity in the physical plant and forgoing the tuition subsidy from taxpayer money, but the odds are against it.
Curious, isn't it? The marketplace continues to show considerable demand for all-women's colleges, next to none for all-men's colleges. Yet Virginia long ago opened its erstwhile women's colleges - Radford, Longwood, Mary Washington - to men; it's VMI, one of the men's schools, that's allowed to keep marching out of step.
What has coeducation done for VMI's neighbor? Here's one opinion, that of the 1994 edition of The Fiske Guide to Colleges:
"Clearly, Washington and Lee is a school steeped in tradition, yet is one working hard to find the future. W&L is arguably the most improved liberal-arts school in the nation. The number of women on campus is growing since their admittance in 1986 (some traditions die hard), and they now number almost 40 percent of the student body."
Here's what Fiske says about VMI, where traditions apparently don't die at all (or maybe they just rot out from the inside, where nobody can see):
Well, I'm afraid Fiske says nothing at all about poor VMI. It doesn't make the list of 317 - including 12, both public and private, in Virginia - of "the best and most interesting institutions in the nation."
One view holds that there continues to be a demand for women's colleges because they offer chances at campus leadership, academic honors and the like that would not be afforded women in a coeducational setting. Some truth there, I suppose, but it's getting a bit stale.
Besides, there's a better explanation: Men's colleges pretty much died out because they found that, if they didn't go coed, they'd be left in the dust by competitors who did. The arrival of women, in other words, improved men's colleges a lot more than the arrival of men improved women's colleges.
Which leaves the taxpayers of Virginia, propping up the VMI follies, stuck with a market loser.
by CNB