Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 11, 1994 TAG: 9402110172
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Testifying Thursday, the second day of hearings on the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership, VMI's alumni director said a resolution promising to help the young women graduates was passed this month by VMI alumni.
Alumni ties are a valuable part of what any college or university offers its students, often giving access to jobs or careers.
"The alumni are extremely supportive and committed to making it work," said Paul Maini, executive vice president of the VMI Alumni Association.
The agreement arose in other testimony, when Cynthia Tyson, president of Mary Baldwin College - where the institute would be located - said she expected the network to help women students find "externships." These are work/mentor relationships built into the leadership program, which also is expected to include tough physical education, increased math and science courses and ROTC training.
The alumni assistance to graduates, said Tyson, "is a most important issue here."
Meantime, in their cross-examination of the five witnesses who took the stand Thursday, U.S. Justice Department attorneys hammered at the nonmilitary aspects of the proposed women's institute. The government has not budged from the position it held when it first brought suit against the state and publicly funded, all-male VMI in 1990: that the school must admit women.
Feminist scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who supports the women's institute, rejected the government notion that a full-time military atmosphere is required to produce citizen-soldiers.
"Not every hour of marching in formation is necessarily a prerequisite for being a citizen-soldier," she said in her second day of testimony.
Justice Department attorney Michael Maurer repeatedly pressed Tyson to say whether she would advise a young woman interested in a military career to attend a school with a long tradition of producing military leaders.
Although Tyson acknowledged that the nation's coeducational military academies would be part of a discussion, she finally responded, "She might survive, but surviving is not thriving."
Meantime, VMI alumni and former U.S. Army ROTC Cadet Command Gen. Robert Wagner stated that assessment scores for ROTC graduates show that those who come out of civilian programs do as well as those from military schools.
"VMI graduates do no better than other students from other universities across the nation," he said, citing a survey of 274 schools.
In testimony read into the record, Harvard University sociologist David Riesman, strongly supported the "inventive" proposal.
"The fact that the controversy ends up with this new program, with VMI extant, is a great achievement for Virginia and the country," read the statement from Riesman.
He did envision some problems if other Mary Baldwin students think institute women "get special benefits."
by CNB