Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 24, 1994 TAG: 9402250040
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It might be better.
Mary Baldwin, to be sure, is operating in the red, and enjoys nothing like VMI's enormous endowment. The notion of a female alternative to VMI is in essence a legal ploy to allow Virginia Military Institute to maintain its all-male status quo.
Yet, where details of the proposed Mary Baldwin program follow the VMI model - the concept of education as the sum of the total college experience, and not merely what's taught in the classroom; the stress on organization in study and work habits; the requirement that students learn to adjust to a new environment; the leveling and meritocratic effect of a quasi-military system - they capture what's good about VMI for many students.
And where the Mary Baldwin program departs from the VMI model - no rat line, less Mickey Mouse in general, the forswearing of amateur psychotherapy in the form of student spirit-breaking, less emphasis on command-and-control leadership style - it marks an improvement.
If the courts come to a similar conclusion, VMI might be allowed to stay its present course. The courts might accept as constitutionally valid the plan for VMI to remain all-male and public, with equitable financial support going to the new sister institute at all-female (though private) Mary Baldwin.
The plan's legal underpinning, however, is still the suspect notion that a state agency may refuse its services to a class of citizens on the basis of biology rather than behavior. Separate-but-equal in matters of gender, the courts might decide, is as self-contradictory as in matters of race. At the least, the VMI plan furthers the pernicious idea that Americans are to be viewed as members of groups rather than as individual citizens of the republic.
Nor does the plan resolve vexatious policy questions for Virginia taxpayers. Why should they keep shelling out money (at a much higher per-student cost than for other state colleges) to sustain the kind of VMI that can exist only in the absence of women cadets? Why continue throwing public dollars at the kind of VMI that offers not just a discriminatory but an increasingly outdated education, given the society and economy taking shape for the 21st century?
In that economy and society, women will play important roles. Virginia and the nation can't afford to waste the productive and leadership skills of half the population.
Indeed, any VMI cadet who graduates with the assumption that women make fine helpmates but not workmates, or that he won't find himself working f+iforo a woman someday, is likely in for a real-world shock.
VMI spokesmen note that their school is different from the national service academies, which now admit women. Most VMI graduates do not pursue military careers.
But this only underscores the point that the business and professional world in which most VMI alumni will make their way is changing fast. The proven superiority of worker-empowerment and collegial-leadership techniques (which Mary Baldwin proposes to teach in its program) is forcing organizations to change or go belly up.
No question: If VMI admits women, it won't be the same VMI.
But can you really tell a Virginian she can't be admitted to a state institution of higher education, directly funded by taxpayers, because she is of the wrong gender?
Rightfully proud of its traditions, VMI can change and still be different from other schools. To accept the need for change would serve the interests not just of legal justice, but of better education.
by CNB