Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 21, 1995 TAG: 9501240040
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
On Monday, Virginia Tech Paul Torgersen and Radford University's interim head, Charles Owens, are scheduled to testify before the House Appropriations Committee on how the budget cuts would affect their universities.
Five college presidents told a subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday that proposed higher education cuts would cripple their universities.
``We simply cannot have the best system of higher education in the nation by investing the least,'' Timothy Sullivan, president of the College of William and Mary, told a Senate subcommittee on education.
Gov. George Allen has proposed stripping state colleges of $47.4 million to help pay for his tax and spending cuts. The colleges are asking the General Assembly to spare them from the cuts and are seeking an additional $51 million.
Also protesting the cuts were John Casteen of the University of Virginia, George Johnson of George Mason University, Harrison Wilson of Norfolk State University and Eugene Trani of Virginia Commonwealth University.
Absent from the meeting was scheduled speaker John Knapp, the superintendent of Virginia Military Institute and the chairman of the state Council of Presidents.
Knapp was asked not to speak by the rector, or chairman, of VMI's board of visitors, Harvey S. Sadow of Ridgefield, Conn.
When contacted by telephone, Knapp said he was unable to attend and declined further questions.
Samuel B. Witt III, a VMI board of visitors member, later said the school's ongoing litigation over its male-only admissions policy precluded Knapp from participating.
``Both the General Assembly and the governor have been extremely supportive of VMI's position in the current litigation,'' he said, adding that Knapp's testimony would be "confusing."
The state is funding a military school program for women at Mary Baldwin College, a private women's school, as a means of satisfying a federal court ruling either to admit women to VMI, allow the school to go private or offer a parallel program for women elsewhere.
As head of the president's coalition, Knapp was put in the position of championing all the schools who had suffered deep cuts in Allen's budget, like the $14 million hit to Virginia Tech's agriculture programs.
VMI also received $950,000 from the state to pay for uniforms and other military items, such as training, to be distributed to the new Virginia Corps of Cadets that has grown from the court case. The corps will be made up of two contingents of single-sex cadets at VMI, Mary Baldwin, and the co-ed component - Tech's Corps of Cadets. Funding, at $1,900 per cadet, has been in VMI's budget since 1985. The additional money means that Tech's cadets will no longer pay $500 per year to rent their uniforms.
The U.S. Department of Justice is challenging the Mary Baldwin program, saying it does not qualify as a parallel program.
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
by CNB