ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606270037
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
AFTER MORE than five years and millions of dollars spent, the VMI question has been settled predictably - and rightly.
If Virginia Military Institute wishes to remain a state institution, its males-only admissions policy must be jettisoned. The U.S. Supreme Court says so.
Ironically, proponents of the males-only policy lost in part because they made an effective case for themselves. In arguing for the value of the unique kind of education that VMI provides, they pointed up the unconstitutionality of the state's providing it only for men.
Virginia, lower courts had ruled, must offer an equivalent opportunity for women. The Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership - smaller, newer, less rigorous in many respects, not an institution itself but rather a state-aided part of private Mary Baldwin College - is not an adequate equal-opportunity answer, the high court said Wednesday.
The court's 7-1 vote was strikingly decisive, spanning the ideological rifts that often divide the justices. Only Antonin Scalia dissented, and his lament that the decision "shuts down an institution that has served ... Virginia with pride and distinction" is unpersuasive hyperbole.
VMI is not about to shut down. It does, however, face potentially tough choices.
The educational issue has never been whether admitting women would change VMI. Of course it would. The issue has been whether the change would be for good or for ill, and how much so.
The legal question has been resolved now with a ruling that seemed, to many, a foregone conclusion. But the answers to the educational questions are less clear.
We have enough confidence in the intelligence and pride of VMI administrators, alumni and students to discount the worst-case possibility: a policy of coeducation so grudgingly applied as to amount to a 1990s version of the massive resistance to racial integration that besmirched Virginia in the 1950s. Times have changed. The nation's military academies, for example, all admit women. If VMI is to admit them, its acceptance of coeducation will be genuine.
But there is another possibility: staying all-male by going private. Though ruling against VMI's males-only policy, the court declined to make sex-based distinctions subject to the same strict scrutiny by which racial distinctions are examined. The justices' appropriate reluctance bolsters the legal viability of private single-sex schools.
VMI, moreover, is in an unusual position for a public college or university: Its private endowment and record of alumni support are strong enough to keep the idea of going private at least within the realm of plausibility.
Even for VMI, though, it wouldn't be easy. Private funds not only would have to pick up the operating support now provided by state tax funds. A private VMI also would need to purchase the campus from the state - assuming the absence of any other legally defensible arms-length arrangement for retaining use of it.
Whatever the military institute's ultimate fate, it won't be the VMI community's alone to resolve. The school's abiding pride and tradition surely will play a role, as they have through much of Virginia's history. But as a state institution, VMI is owned by the people of Virginia. That, after all, is why the court was bound to reject VMI's refusal to admit women.
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