ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 3, 1996 TAG: 9607030020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT JOHNSON
IN THE early 1970s, my mother, a divorced, black, middle-school math teacher with two college-aged sons, moved from the house she had lived in since 1960 in a small rural community on the outskirts of Philadelphia to an apartment complex in Durham, N.C.
After teaching for five years at a Quaker preparatory school in Wilmington, Del., she had taken a job as head teacher at another Friends middle school that had been formed by Durham Quakers in response to the phenomenon of "seg academies." These were all-white private schools that had sprung up across the South to give whites hoping to avoid court-ordered public school desegregation a legal means of escape.
The principal of my mother's new school, Harold Jernigan, had set up his institution largely as a contrast to these academies. Like those, Jernigan's school was privately funded, and like many of them, it had a religious affiliation. But, unlike them, it was deliberately interracial in student body and staff - part of his reason for hiring my mother.
The flight to the segregated academies had left many recently desegregated public schools in the South virtually all-black, and all the court orders in the world could not make the white students who had abandoned them return. So the Quakers and other people of tolerance in Durham set up their integrated private school as a rebuke to the notion that decent people were free to practice educational discrimination so long as they did it with their own money.
I have been thinking hard about the Durham Quakers' example since learning of the Supreme Court's 7-1 order to Virginia Military Institute to open its doors to women, and hearing VMI officials' and alumni's repeated threats to "take VMI private" to avoid complying with the ruling of the nation's highest court. For even by the standards of the segregation academies, VMI's threat seems outrageous, since, unlike the academies' menace, it is not simply a threat to abandon a public educational institution, but basically to steal it - in the name of liberty.
Throughout its battle to remain what its officials called "single-sex," and what the court majority clearly called sexist, VMI claimed it was serving Virginia and Virginians - that its cause was our cause. But now that the court has declared that it has been serving only some Virginians, and not many others, this putative state institution suddenly suggests it should become independent of the very commonwealth citizens and officials who - too often - wrongly supported its fight. It's as if VMI has all along been merely a parochial school errantly receiving state funds, and all it has to do now is give the money back and say it won't take any more.
This is the essence of an absurd proposal to pay the state for its Lexington campus and declare itself "independent," as if money would somehow settle all its accounts or turn it into some new bastion of democracy. Virginians who have fought to keep VMI all-male should be as outraged by this ruse as those who have struggled to bring it haltingly into the second half of the fading 20th century.
One wonders, in any case, how a school purportedly dedicated to U.S. military traditions, which generally include swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, could even contemplate taking an action deliberately intended to evade the strictures of the Constitution as expressly decided by the Supreme Court. At least the supporters of the segregation academies never risked that kind of hypocrisy.
What decent military traditions could the privatizing of VMI uphold? Tailhook? A new kind of martial law? In what way could it possibly prepare graduates for life in a modern and diverse armed forces subject to the rule of civilian authority, where many of the officers and civil leaders are female? How could such graduates avoid being, like the unfortunate graduates of segregated academies, cultural fossils? Who, in the wake of three U.S. sailors' rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl, the idiot comments about it by their commanding admiral, and the sexual-harassment lawsuit against Mitsubishi, would not think twice about offering a privatized VMI graduate command of a brigade, or of a corporate sales division?
Why are otherwise exemplary soldiers like VMI's alumni and officials unable to say what the Citadel's superintendent so simply said in response to the decision: "The Citadel will comply with the law ... as the law has been interpreted by the highest court in the land"? Why can they not simply state, "VMI will follow the court's lawful orders?"
If VMI truly values its traditions, it will drop its degrading talk of privatizing and join the modern world, to which it still has much to offer. Or, it can turn back the clock a quarter century, to my mother's time in Durham, when otherwise good and well-intentioned, but frightened, people thought they could simply buy their way out of having to obey the law.
Scott Johnson of Blacksburg is director of clinical training in the Marriage and Family Therapy Doctoral Program at Virginia Tech.
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