ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 23, 1996 TAG: 9609230090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
note: lede
Virginia Military Institute officials said Sunday that they're ready to move aggressively toward coed status, but will ask the state for $5.7 million to help the school prepare to admit women.
VMI is held up as a "kind of retrograde and reactionary place that hunkers down and glowers at the world," and that's not accurate, Superintendent Josiah Bunting III said Sunday, a day after the school's board voted to accept female students.
"There are a lot of very bright people here determined to do things as well as they can be done, and who, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, are kind of liberal and open-minded," said Bunting, the school's leader for 13 months.
Three months after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the public college to admit women, VMI's board on Saturday decided by one vote to give up efforts to take the school private to keep it all-male.
Bunting, a 1963 VMI graduate who fought as tenaciously as anyone against accepting women, says he'll fight "with the same efficiency, and with elegance" to see that women are integrated into the student body.
The Lexington school has a game plan to recruit and admit women, he said, including:
* Using a $10 million gift for merit scholarships, announced Saturday, to recruit both female and male students,
* Increasing the number of females on the school's administrative staff by filling a new admissions officer position with a female and considering a woman for an assistant commandant's job that has been kept open pending the board's vote,
* Looking for women to fill faculty positions as the jobs become available over the next few years to try to bring the faculty ratio closer to the national average of 20 percent female.
There are eight women among the current 100 full-time faculty members.
Bunting said the addition of women comes when the school already is making changes to appeal to more students. VMI has a capacity of 1,380, but has 1,218 students.
The school is adding a major in psychology and increasing courses in journalism and teacher certification in an effort to attract more applicants, he said.
VMI plans to insist that women students accept the same conditions as male students, Bunting said. That includes buzz haircuts and no latches on the doors.
Asked if that might invite charges of sexual harassment, Bunting replied:
"You have to do what you think is right and honorable, and if that leads to such a charge, that is a risk you have to take."
Bunting said he plans to address the student body at its regular Tuesday gathering, but that today he'll try to talk with "everybody I can grab by the lapels."
In 10 days, he will begin visiting alumni organizations in Virginia and along the East Coast.
"One of my roles now is to bind up the wounds that various members of the family have suffered and put some salve on bruises, because whatever the people's position on this issue, we now have to bring all of those people together," he said.
VMI gets $10.3 million of its annual $32.5 million operating budget from the state. Another $8.5 million comes from annual gifts and profits from the school's endowment.
The $5.7 million VMI wants to support the change to coed is needed for reasons as varied as hiring the new admissions officer, redoing recruitment literature to appeal to men and women, and renovating bathrooms to get ready for female students, said board member Sam Witt of Richmond.
Some of the things that have to be done are "simple in the extreme," he said.
One change involves rerouting student access from the academic building to the gym so it doesn't go through a bathroom, Witt said.
Witt, Class of '58, voted in favor of admitting women, but said he voted his head and not his heart.
Witt said he, like Bunting, regrets the change for VMI.
"I've witnessed it close up and personal for almost six years," he said. "Nobody hurts more than I do."
It's time for everyone involved to move forward, though, he said.
"Something we need to keep right squarely in front of us is that the mission of VMI is to produce educated and honorable men and, now, women," Witt said.
How VMI accomplishes the admission of women is even more complicated than deciding to admit women, said Kent Willis, director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Our society recognizes equality with certain essential differences between sexes," Willis said Sunday. "We allow for women's bathrooms and men's bathrooms. The same philosophy that applies to differences in bathrooms needs to apply across the board."
VMI's plan has to be approved by the court, Willis noted, but he added that the ACLU will continue to "keep an eye on VMI."
If VMI ends up with some sort of "vicious compliance, and if the result is that women are less likely to be accepted and treated equally" - and the courts and the Justice Department don't remedy the situation - the ACLU will certainly consider litigation against the school, he said.
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