ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 2, 1996 TAG: 9607020029
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Ellen Goodman
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
IT WAS THE Case of the Last Bastion.
By any reckoning, Virginia Military Institute was at the very rear of the rear guard. When other public colleges in Virginia went coed, VMI resisted. When other military academies admitted women and saw them thrive, VMI refused.
No stranger to lost causes, the school that sent its boys out to fight the Yankees in the Civil War was - along with The Citadel - the last publicly funded military college in the country to refuse admission to women. But no longer.
Six years ago, I was on the Spartan, neo-Gothic grounds of VMI, when T-shirts first screamed ``Better Dead Than Coed.'' Even then, VMI seemed less a threat to women's rights than an anachronism.
The gentlemanly commandant defended the famous ``rat line'' and the ritual abuse called ``adversative training'' as if it were an endangered species. He used words like ``diversity'' and ``equality'' in ways that were oddly familiar and utterly outlandish. He talked about ``diversity of institutions'' and ``equality among men'' - values that would, he said, be destroyed by the equality of women and diversity of gender.
During the intervening years, as this case roamed across the legal landscape on its way to the Supreme Court, VMI's lawyers tested every revisionist argument in the gender book, new and neo, in defense of the all-male status quo.
At times they sounded like the presidents of Smith or Wellesley, singing the benefits of single-sex education, evoking the arguments of the avant-garde to defend the rear guard. At other times they sounded like pop psychologists assuring us that men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
In a last-ditch effort, Virginia established a ``separate but equal'' program for women at nearby Mary Baldwin College. Men, they ``explained,'' thrive through ``adversative training," women through ``cooperate training.'' An appeals-court judge went positively lyrical, if not loony, writing ``If VMI marches to the beat of a drum, then Mary Baldwin marches to the melody of a fife and when the march is over both will have arrived at the same destination.''
But last Wednesday, the Supreme Court called a different tune. Pop psychologists may say that we come from different planets, but the court said we are governed by the same Constitution.
Writing for the majority with a clarity and sense of history that has marked her career, Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the Mary Baldwin program not as an ``equal'' but a ``pale shadow'' of VMI. She wrote that we cannot use stereotypes - ``generalizations about the way women are'' - as a justification for excluding all women. The court ruled - again and forcefully - that the state had to provide equal protection for men and women.
What happens now to the last bastion, this institutional endangered species?
In 1990, the cadet guiding me around the barren barracks asked me his trick question: ``Would women change VMI?'' I answered, ``Of course,'' and he seemed surprised. Others who favored admitting women had told him that women would simply slip into the existing rat line.
I have no doubt that there are some women who will find this ``adversative training,'' this bonding through harassment, appealing, just as there are women who choose boot camp. Even among men, VMI appeals to such a small subset, that the school accepts 75 percent of its applicants.
But I also don't hesitate to say that women will change VMI. Change is, after all, the point.
Have we forgotten that laws against discrimination were meant to alter the status quo? Once, VMI was all-white. The first blacks arrived in 1968. Shortly thereafter, the college stopped playing ``Dixie'' on parade. Now Justice Clarence Thomas' son is part of the VMI ``tradition.''
There was no more reason to save the snail darter of sex discrimination than to save the last Jim Crow of apartheid. But there is a difference between extinction and evolution.
If VMI remains a public college dedicated to the producing ``citizen-soldiers,'' then, as Justice Ginsburg wrote, ``surely that goal is great enough to accommodate women.'' And just as surely, you can count on it, those women will become part of the new VMI tradition.
- The Boston Globe
LENGTH: Medium: 82 linesby CNB