Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 24, 1994                   TAG: 9408240048
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WOMEN'S COLLEGES AND VMI

If the test of value is what customers want, then Virginia has it exactly backwards. Wiser than a single-sex institution for men and none for women, theoretically speaking, would be state ownership and operation of a single-sex institution for women and none for men.

The increases - enrollment is up 30 percent at Hollins, for example - may be a temporary phenomenon. Not so temporary, however, is the fact that the private sector continues to support many more women's schools than men's.

Granted, the predominant marketplace pattern for the past 25 years has been toward coeducation and away from single-sex colleges, for men or women. But among those that have remained single-sex, women's colleges are in the huge majority. Moreover, two of the dozens of women's colleges are state schools, while two of the mere handful of men's schools - VMI and The Citadel - exist by the grace of significant public subsidy. In Virginia, all four women's colleges are private; only one (Hampden-Sydney) of the two men's schools is.

Consumer demand is not the only possible measure of value. Adherence to the U.S. Constitution, including the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, is another.

In the Justice Department's suit against VMI, the prevailing legal standard at the moment (VMI's attorneys have reserved the right to appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court) is an appeals court's decision that the state cannot operate a single-sex college for men without offering a similarly single-sex educational opportunity for women. Now on appeal is whether VMI's proposed solution, support for a new Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership on the campus of women-only Mary Baldwin College, meets the equal-protection test.

On the whole, women's colleges have sympathized with VMI, fearing that a decision adverse to single-sex education there could haunt them as well. The women's colleges could come to regret their sympathy.

Potentially threatened by VMI's position, for example, is the distinction between public and private - the notion, re-emphasized by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, that private-sector institutions have leeway that governmental agencies like VMI do not.

The distinction is one that the private women's colleges presumably would fight for. But the distinction, not always clearcut anyway, would be further eroded if a program for women housed at private Mary Baldwin is deemed a constitutionally acceptable facsimile of the program for men at public VMI.

If the public-private distinction vanishes, thereby rendering the women's colleges subject to the same equal-protection requirements as a VMI, their fallback position might be to argue that they are needed as a remedial measure for historic bias against women.

At least in terms of cultural bias, this has been - and apparently is - a potent recruiting device for the women's colleges. But as a legal claim to a special privilege not afforded men's schools, it might be viewed as an extension of the kind of protective paternalism that has held women back more than it has opened new paths for them.

Much better to maintain the distinction between higher education's public and private sectors, even if the cost is a coeducational VMI. The private sector could then retain a degree of institutional diversity, including single-sex schools, that is fraught with problems for public agencies.