ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300102
SECTION: 3 EDITORIAL EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: GEOFF SEAMANS
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS\EDITORIAL WRITER
EIGHT days ago, the Board of Visitors of Virginia Military Institute voted to begin admitting women for the class that enters next fall.
The news was the lead story the next morning on the front page of this paper. No surprise there: The Roanoke Times is published in a city less than an hour's drive from the VMI campus.
Nor was it a surprise that the news made the front page of The Washington Post. The Post, in addition to being a leading national paper, is the local rag for hundreds of thousands of Northern Virginians.
Coming home from the beach, I learned of the board's decision from the Wilmington, N.C., paper, which had picked up The Post story from the wire and also played it on the front page. Well, Wilmington isn't far up the coast from The Citadel, also affected by the Supreme Court's recent VMI ruling, and North Carolina shares a long border with Virginia.
Why, though, on the front page of The New York Times?
The big story, after all, was back in June, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled definitively that the state of Virginia could not constitutionally maintain an institution so unique as VMI and reserve its benefits only for men.
I, anyway, had never heard serious speculation that the state or VMI should try to defy the court. At issue eight days ago was how best to comply - go coed or go private. The latter was more problematic but nevertheless an option seemingly left open in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion. A divided board decided in favor of the former.
On the surface, the question of whether to privatize one small unit (1,300 students) of Virginia's system of higher education would seem to be of mainly state and local interest.
But VMI is an eccentric place, and the matter involved application of the Constitution to a gender-related issue. By New York Times standards, maybe that counts as a juicy, high-readership story of perversion and sex.
Plus, the gray lady had some editorializing to do in its news columns.
VMI, the story said flatly, had been "defying a Supreme Court order for three months." The story contrasted that with The Citadel, which "waited just 48 hours to welcome women to its campus."
VMI officials' statements that women would be required to get crewcuts and meet the same physical requirements as men, the story said flatly, was "yet another act of defiance." The story contrasted that, too, with The Citadel, which like the service academies allows women to have longer hair than men and scores them differently on fitness tests.
The VMI case was compared to Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school-desegregation case. That morsel at least was attributed to a source (Deval L. Patrick, the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights) rather than stated as unadorned fact.
Give me a break.
The editorial position of The New York Times newsroom manages to misunderstand Ginsburg's ruling, to misunderstand VMI, and to trivialize the evils of racial segregation and Virginia's 1950s policy of "massive resistance" to school desegregation.
The court didn't order VMI to make special allowances for women. It said, rather, that some women could make it at VMI and should not be denied the chance to do so. This is consistent with Ginsburg's brand of judicial feminism, which tends to see "protections" for women as a fast track to discrimination against women.
Nor does the case bear more than superficial resemblance to the school-desegregation cases that helped bring on a civil-rights revolution. Jim Crow was the norm throughout Virginia and the South; the VMI case is of interest largely because of its uniqueness.
And with its alleged foot-dragging since the ruling, VMI is giving itself a chance to do what The Citadel manifestly is not: make women a full-fledged part of the place. Judged by different standards, subject to different rules, only four in a class of 581 freshmen - how else will the women of The Citadel be viewed than as a breed apart?
Agreed, the millions spent by VMI's private foundations in fighting the coeducation lawsuit would have been better spent improving VMI.
Agreed, too, unabashed sexism informs some of the anti-coeducation sentiment within the VMI community, and must be fought vigorously if coeducation is to be a success
And agreed, VMI is nowhere I would've wanted to go to school
But however peculiar may be the "adversative" character of the VMI system, there is egalitarian virtue in treating all cadets - short or tall, thin or pudgy, natural athletes or natural clutzes - the same, even if the standards are harder to meet for some than for others.
If VMI were not to insist on treating women the same as men now, that would be the disservice.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 linesby CNB