Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 21, 1995 TAG: 9508210124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Trimble Bailey is a college recruiter's dream. The Roanoke County teen-ager is articulate, smart, and, at 18, knows she wants to be a doctor - preferably through the Air Force, so ROTC scholarships can pay her way.
Wouldn't you sign her up for your experiment?
The experiment is the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership, the state's alternative to enrolling women at the public, all-male Virginia Military Institute.
Bailey is also her own person, and has no problem saying she'll stay in the Mary Baldwin College-based program only if it suits her aims. So far, it looks good. But if that changes, so will she.
"We're going to focus on her goal. We're not Mary Baldwin to the end," said Denise Bailey, Trimble's mother. "Which is reasonable for anybody going to school - they're going to get an education."
That's no surprise to the director of the women's program.
"Students shop very carefully for their education," Brenda Bryant said.
Four days after Shannon Faulkner quit as the first woman cadet at the nation's only other all-male, public military college - The Citadel, in South Carolina - Bailey and 41 other inaugural freshmen enter the Virginia women's program on Tuesday. Within weeks of their entry, their school could be back in court - this time, the U.S. Supreme Court, the last step on the legal ladder. By October, the court is expected to say if it will hear the U.S. Justice Department's 6-year-old sex discrimination case against VMI.
The women's institute was approved in January by a split federal appeals court that agreed the state could institute the program instead of admitting women to state-funded VMI. Court hearings are scheduled this fall as part of the Faulkner suit for a similar women's program in South Carolina so The Citadel can remain all-male.
Virginia taxpayers give each of their leadership institute students $7,300 per year, making up the tuition difference between public VMI and private Mary Baldwin - and providing an attractive incentive to students. VMI's private foundation has promised a $5 million endowment if VMI wins the case. So far, the foundation has given the women's college $546,000 in start-up funding.
For its part, Mary Baldwin pledges to see each freshman class through to its senior year, regardless of the outcome of the court case, college spokeswoman Crista Cabe said. Students officially are Mary Baldwin students, but live together, are required to take leadership courses, participate in sports, community activities and ROTC, and undergo a more structured lifestyle than their classmates.
Last week, with fatigue-brown and olive green T-shirts and socks piled on her bed, Trimble Bailey was getting ready to go into the woods for a four-day wilderness experience that would begin the day after her first day of college. She sat down to talk the same day that intense heat sent Faulkner to the hospital for tests. Both Bailey and her mother seemed at once aghast at the legal ordeal Faulkner endured to gain entry to The Citadel - and curious about why she wanted to go there so badly.
The day after Faulkner quit, having spent four days in the infirmary for heat exhaustion, Denise Bailey said she "ached" for the young woman.
"I don't think she was given good counsel, and I think this is a direct result of that. Somebody should have known that child wasn't ready for what was expected of her," she said.
"She had a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon real early. People could have helped her, physically and emotionally, so that she could have been ready."
Faulkner clearly "has a lot of potential in her life, to have gone through what she's gone through, and withstood all she's withstood. She's probably an exceptional person," she said.
Trimble Bailey feels sorry for Faulkner, still wonders what her goal has been, and was not impressed by the gleeful reaction of Faulkner's classmates to the news of her withdrawal.
"From seeing what she's been through, right now with the media caught up in it, I personally would not want to go through what she's been through.
"She was an individual who could not handle it. A different person at a different time may have made it. It's completely individual - I don't think you can group it all as a whole [example] for womankind," she said.
In an interview last week, Bailey expressed how she felt about women at VMI.
"I don't think women should go to VMI," she said, because they have their own state program now.
Some experts say the leadership institute should produce female leaders of the same caliber as the male leaders VMI produces. This week, the testing of the program will begin.
"It could go any way now," Bailey said. "It could fall; it could rise above VMI."
Bailey, who is Roanoke County's Junior Miss, became interested in the military during the Persian Gulf War. Even though she has a grandfather who served in World War II, the military doesn't run in the family. Her parents, Denise and Mike - both Virginia Tech graduates - gravitated to social services.
Bailey considered the federal military academies. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, nominated her to go to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. She earned a 3.9 grade-point average during her four years at Roanoke Valley Christian Academy, and scored 1130 on her SATs.
But the family was not able to visit the academies before Bailey applied. Besides, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that, with that route, the military would come first, then medicine. So she started to check into ROTC scholarships, and settled on the Air Force. She considered the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Duke University, the University of Kentucky. She pondered what to do.
Then came the evening she and her family went to the Salem Civic Center for a college night. They wandered through row after row, and booth after booth, of college recruiters. On the way out, VWIL caught Bailey's eye.
Within a couple of days, Tom Brokaw's news organization came knocking. A reporter spent a day following her through her high school halls. Then the family took a half-day off - "just for the fun, really, of the experience," Denise Bailey said - to visit Mary Baldwin, where the news crew wanted to tape Bailey amid the ecru brick campus buildings set in a hillside.
The news segment never did air. But Bailey ended up talking more and more to the Mary Baldwin folks. They recruited hard, but weren't pushy, she said - adding that she gets mail from them nearly every day. They even sent a birthday card.
In the end, Bailey's choices boiled down to VWIL and Kentucky. Bailey wants to major in physics, which Mary Baldwin doesn't offer. So the Staunton women's college negotiated with Washington & Lee University, located next to VMI in Lexington. With ROTC students traveling to Lexington anyway, Bailey's transportation is taken care of. And now she has a physics major by taking classes at W&L.
Bryant, the institute's director, said that while the physics major was especially set up for Bailey, the two colleges are part of a consortium that for years has allowed students to take courses at different colleges.
Bailey also had a $9,000 ROTC scholarship for three years. The institute then offered the state-supplied $7,300 per year; Mary Baldwin offered another scholarship and won her over.
The mix of students arriving Tuesday morning is broad, Bryant said. Some wanted to attend a women's college. Some Virginia students considered the same schools Bailey considered. Seven are coming out of military academies or junior ROTC programs.
But the high-profile court case that brings them to their new school doesn't seem to be uppermost in their minds. And they might have an opinion on the case between Faulkner and The Citadel, "but they don't seem to connect it to their experience here," Bryant said.
Bryant, the former manager of a Washington, D.C., consulting firm, has only one concern.
"The whole program is new, and when you're doing something for the first time, it's a learning experience. We're discovering things that are new to us, or different from what we expected. Hopefully, [they're] good surprises," she said.
Meanwhile, back at the Bailey residence in Roanoke County, mom Denise admits she's a little nervous. Whether it's the usual concern about sending the eldest off to college, or a mental flag gone up because her daughter may be entering a high-profile fishbowl, she isn't sure. She's lived around Roanoke all her life and has seen that the VMI graduates "do seem to get all the leadership positions."
"I agree that women haven't had the opportunities," she said. "I still don't know if going into a male-dominated environment," like Faulkner's brief entrance into The Citadel, is the way to accomplish that aim.
In her mind, an all-women's college may offer her daughter more leadership opportunities - as its proponents long have argued.
Going to an all-women's college will be new, Trimble Bailey said. She's curious to meet her classmates. She's ready to give it a shot - even with the publicity.
"I enjoy seeing this ordeal. To me, I'm just going to school and doing what Trimble does. For some reason, it interests people," she said.
by CNB