ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 23, 1996 TAG: 9608230040
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
IF BILL Clinton is interested in spit-shining an Election Year image as a president more interested in building for the future than rehashing group grievances from the past, here's an idea:
Talk to the U.S. Justice Department lawyers working on the Virginia Military Institute case. Tell 'em to cool their briefs.
VMI is under court order to go coed or go private. The private Alumni Association is looking into the latter, less likely possibility. A committee of VMI administrators, faculty and cadets is studying the former: What should be done to make the transition to coeducation a success?
For VMI officials to consult with the federal military academies about coeducation would seem not only natural but obligatory. VMI and the national academies are not identical, a point stressed in the litigation by defenders of the VMI status quo. But there are strong resemblances, a point stressed by the Justice lawyers who brought the suit. The academies, having themselves gone from all-male to coed in the not-too-distant past, just might have learned a thing or two from the experience that could make the VMI transition easier for all concerned.
But Justice objects. In a snippy letter to VMI, the department recently said VMI contact with the federal academies must be stopped unless described in writing to the department and cleared beforehand by its lawyers.
VMI officials have gone so far as to report an incidental conversation between a VMI professor and three U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen while the professor was vacationing in Colorado. Perhaps a publicity stunt, it's clearly an overreaction - but no less so than the ridiculous ukase from Justice.
Neither coeducation nor privatization is the worst of all possible VMI worlds. A haphazard, ineptly planned move to coeducation, a la the Shannon Faulkner fiasco at The Citadel, just might be.
In erecting bureaucratic barriers to conversations between VMI and the U.S. military academies, Justice seems to prefer scoring cheap lawyers' points to making coeducation a success.
LENGTH: Short : 43 linesby CNB