Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 7, 1994 TAG: 9402070034
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
Think what you will of Virginia Military Institute's disputed all-male admission policy. Here in Mallory Hall, where nothing seems to have changed since they hauled Stonewall's stuffed war horse into the museum across the way, it's Ma'am City when a woman's around.
"Yes, ma'am," says Abram Charleton, turning crisply from his wooden half-desk when asked about his math teacher. "A lot of people are trying to get her [class]. She's known to be good."
"Yes, ma'am," says Charles Cart, queried about this class, a requirement for engineering majors. "Calculus III is the hardest."
"They'll ma'am you to death around here," says longtime math professor Vonda Walsh, as her female colleagues nod vigorously.
On that, they can agree. But there's no uniformity of opinion when it comes to the national sex-discrimination debate swirling around their campus.
Eleven women enter VMI classrooms on a near-daily basis; not all want to talk about whether women should be admitted to the 155-year-old public college. They are a distinct minority at the 155-year-old school, just 9 percent of the entire faculty. Compare that to The Citadel, where a similar legal row rages: 14 percent of its faculty are women.
At VMI, eight women faculty work full time; three teach part time. Four sat down to talk.
And they talked openly.
Should VMI be coeducational? Or will the proposed Virginia Women's Leadership Institute at private Mary Baldwin College in nearby Staunton fill the constitutional bill demanded by a federal appeals court - and, in the act, preserve Virginia's cherished tradition of single-sex education?
"Separate but equal went out with Brown vs. Board of Education," says history professor Rose Mary Sheldon, an articulate spokeswoman for military education whose criticisms land as politely as a missile.
"I'm not sure why it came back this year."
"VMI is not the school I would have gone to," says math professor Elizabeth Camp, a product of Richmond's all-girls St. Catherine's School. "But what it is, for me, is choice."
A 27-year-old math whiz nearly two years out of the University of Michigan's doctoral program, Camp supports the proposed women's leadership institute and single-sex education. And she thinks the men she teaches do better without women around.
In her classroom only an hour before, where Cart and Charleton learned the theories of L'Hopital's Rule, Camp commanded her captive audience. Standing before the green chalkboard, she accepted the day's attendance from a cadet and announced that the test would be held on Thursday the 10th.
On that same day, 55 miles away in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, the administrators who oversee Camp's college will be well into testimony in the long-running sex-discrimination case against VMI.
On Wednesday, Judge Jackson Kiser begins deliberations on the case remanded to him a year ago by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. His mission: to decide if the planned women's leadership institute, to be set up with $6.9 million from the private VMI Foundation and student scholarships from the state, brings VMI's admission policy in line with the law.
It's the legal "creative/parallel-program option" allowed by the appeals court. VMI's other options? Admit women, or go private.
The cadets, who seem to uniformly line up behind their future alma mater's all-male policy, will be a world away.
The sea of gray and black uniforms in a VMI classroom is startling. A few black duty jackets are tossed sloppily over chairbacks, revealing quilted magenta linings that brighten the room as unexpectedly as a daisy stuck in a rifle barrel.
"This is not the quotient," instructs Camp, a lieutenant commander in VMI's Virginia Militia and an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserves. "It's the derivative of the top.
"This," she says, pointing to the chalkboard, "is the derivative of the bottom."
As in any classroom, the back-of-the-room dwellers seem vaguely fazed.
"You with me?" she asks.
The cadets nod.
"I like a military school," Sheldon says later, seated in the college's Keydet Kanteen. She started teaching just last fall at VMI, bailing out of the seemingly faltering Norwich University in Vermont. That old military college has mixed genders, as well as civilian and military schools, with what Sheldon considers disappointing results.
"Students come to you generally ignorant of a great deal of things. Stupidity, I can take. Rudeness, I can't. At least at VMI, the student has his hair cut, his pants are pressed, and he says, `Yes, ma'am.'
"Once you see the Newark riots," says this New Jersey native, "you never want to see chaos again."
Sheldon's comments came last week, just as the federal government issued a report detailing "rampant" sexual harassment in the nation's coeducational service academies.
Having sat on Norwich's judicial board, Sheldon says she has seen "real ugly" sexual harassment and assault cases arise from putting women into historically all-male military schools.
Although she says she believes the 14th Amendment requires admission of women to VMI, she predicts "20 years of headaches" would follow such a change. Women integrated into all-male military schools feel they must "suck it up" - and take the abuse.
"I feel a natural need to protect them," she said.
And that's reality - apart from ivory tower legal debate in an ordered courtroom. Sheldon pointed to some of the negative comments from cadets about Shannon Faulkner, the woman now attending class at The Citadel pending her appeal for full-time status.
"Any male institution, based on a macho ethic, will have a certain level of misogyny," or hatred of women, Sheldon says.
Has that affected the recruitment of female faculty at VMI? It's hard to tell.
Known for its engineering students - although more than half of the cadets study liberal arts - VMI is not so different from other colleges and universities. Most are still about a decade from anything resembling equality on the technical and engineering fronts as tenure-quality women come into their own in these fields historically dominated by men.
At Virginia Tech, for instance, the engineering faculty is about 3 percent women, and that's typical, says department spokeswoman Lynn Nystrom. Only one of the 10 members of VMI's civil engineering faculty is a woman.
Similar comparisons find VMI's math department about 25 percent women, while the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where women were admitted in 1976, has just under 15 percent women in its math department.
There are other hurdles to hiring at VMI. Faculty must wear a uniform. They have to teach on Saturdays. That discourages many candidates of either sex, say the women faculty interviewed.
You also find yourself in Lexington, Va., not exactly a huge metropolis capable of supporting dual-career families. Three of four women faculty members interviewed either face, or expect to face, a commuter relationship with their spouses or partners.
"The faculty actually make the decision on who is hired," said VMI spokesman Mike Strickler. "To our knowledge, there hasn't been a mandate to say, `You will have `X' number of women.' "
The women who teach at VMI say they like their jobs. Walsh, for instance, has been here nine years. That does not mean she supports the separate-but-equal plan.
"I do believe females should be allowed to experience the same things," says Walsh, a product of three Virginia colleges and universities.
For Walsh, the court case is a question of morality. Government money keeps VMI afloat, and that's the crux of the argument, she says. She blames the state for failing to deal with the discrimination policy.
"A person in the classroom - it doesn't make any difference to me if it's male or female," she says.
What happens outside the classroom - in the residential barracks - is something on which none of these teachers can comment. They're not allowed in to see. Cadets walk the "rat line," fall to the floor to do push-ups at an upperclassman's command, or perform other harsh tasks specifically designed to break the spirt - to rebuild their character.
And it's a pivotal part of VMI's legal argument that its so-called "adversative training" is inappropriate for women. The Justice Department says hogwash - stop promoting gender stereotypes.
"One thing I like about VMI - there's wonderful discipline," says Marilyn Maisano, a professorial-looking graduate of all-women Bryn Mawr. She taught geology and civil engineering at Arizona State University, a 39,000-student institution that dwarfs 1,300-cadet VMI.
"I feel there's a lot to be said of tradition," she said. "As far as I can see, it's not harming things. We shouldn't destroy the past. This is an old Virginia tradition."
And so it is, what with barracks life, Stonewall's Little Sorrel in the museum, and the designation of all teachers, women and men alike, with military rank.
Sometimes the cadets push it, like high school students trying to pull stunts with the new substitute. No-nonsense Sheldon knows they're testing her limits.
So what if they whisper "bitch"?
To cadets at law-and-order Virginia Military Institute, "That's Major Bitch to you," she says.
by CNB