ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, June 28, 1996 TAG: 9606280059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR AND JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITERS
NOTE: above
DESPITE THE RULING against VMI, observers say it won't affect private schools.
Far from writing the obituary on single-sex education, as some VMI supporters have suggested, Wednesday's Supreme Court ruling did just the opposite, legal observers say.
While striking down the Virginia Military Institute's no-women-allowed policy, the court noted the value of men-only and women-only schools, even public ones.
"It is not disputed that diversity among public educational institutions can serve the public good," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.
But, the court ruled, "Women seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything less, under the State's obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection."
Washington and Lee University law professor Ann MacLean Massie interpreted the ruling this way: "The state cannot supply benefits to males it doesn't supply to females - that's where she's coming from."
Jedwiga Sebrechts, executive director of the Women's College Coalition in Washington, said the ruling provides some guidance for public single-sex education.
"You just have to make sure both sexes are treated equitably and if they are, this opinion allows for the existence of publicly supported single-sex institutions," she said.
The opinion was narrowly drawn and applies only to VMI and The Citadel in South Carolina. There are "absolutely no" ramifications for private single-sex schools, Massie said.
Administrators at private women's colleges in Western Virginia were relieved by the decision.
Three years ago, in the throes of VMI's legal quest to keep women out, seven private women's colleges signed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the state-funded institution.
The move puzzled women's organizations and legal experts.
But the colleges' support was not so much for VMI as for single-sex education. One of two briefs signed by the colleges asked the Supreme Court to "reaffirm the value of single-sex education, hold firmly and clearly that it has its place in the American higher education system."
That belief did not waiver this week, despite hints by VMI supporters that the court's ruling would hurt all single-sex institutions.
"I understand the frustration on the part of those who support VMI," said Barbara Perry, an associate professor of government at Sweet Briar College. "But they're exaggerating to say it's an end to all single-gender policies in either the public or private realm."
Perry was new to the faculty at the Amherst County college when it joined Hollins College, Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg and Wells College in Aurora, N.Y., in signing a brief in support of VMI. A separate brief was signed by Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Southern Virginia College for Women in Buena Vista and Saint Mary's College in Raleigh, N.C.
"I remember being perplexed why women's colleges would support the cause of VMI," Perry said. "But I understood why they felt the need to do that. It was a slippery slope argument, a fear that if there were a ruling against VMI, might it not rule against a single-gender education opportunity, even in the private realm?"
But Perry, who was a judicial fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1994-95 academic year, said the VMI ruling didn't reach that far.
"The court took great pains to limit this case to the peculiar circumstances surrounding VMI, and in one instance cited that they had an opportunity to draw an even broader conclusion," she said. "But the court chose not to do that. It bent over backwards in applying its reasoning to the set of circumstances here."
The Supreme Court ruled that Virginia must provide men and women with the same educational opportunities under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.
Ginsburg wrote that Virginia could have provided a separate school for women if it were equal to VMI. But the court dismissed the year-old Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership, set up at Mary Baldwin College as an alternative for women, as so "substantially different and significantly unequal" that it is unacceptable.
"Valuable as VWIL may prove for students who seek the program offered, Virginia's remedy affords no cure at all for the opportunities and advantages withheld from women who want a VMI education and can make the grade."
Her decision says nothing about forcing VMI to recruit women or to accept women who don't meet its physical and academic requirements. But if VMI actively recruits men, observers say, it probably will have to make the same efforts to attract women in order to comply with the court.
Ginsburg stated that most women probably wouldn't want VMI's form of education, just as most men don't. It is only for the women who can meet VMI's requirements that the state must provide "a remedy that will end their exclusion from a state-supplied educational opportunity for which they are fit.
"Education, to be sure, is not a 'one size fits all' business. ... The question is whether the State can constitutionally deny to women who have the will and capacity, the training and attendant opportunities that VMI uniquely affords."
The Supreme Court remanded the case back to Chief U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser in Roanoke, who had ruled in 1990 that VMI could remain all-male. Kiser will have to oversee the implementation of VMI's plan to go co-ed - unless the college becomes private.
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