ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 12, 1996 TAG: 9610140051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
TERRI WHEATON REDDINGS is going to help plant the seed of Virginia Military Institute's female enrollment. She expects some bumps along the way but is still aiming high.
If Terri Wheaton Reddings had a daughter, she would hope that daughter would consider attending Virginia Military Institute.
If she had college to do over again, the 39-year-old Roanoke native would even consider VMI for herself.
"If I had some youth and energy, I certainly would try," she said. "I've always felt that women are just as capable as men in every area."
That's a message Reddings will carry with her in her new job.
VMI announced Friday that the graduate of Patrick Henry High School and Hollins College will start Nov. 11 as the institute's first female admissions officer.
Reddings will draw on experience from her current job as assistant director of admissions at Radford University, as well as past work as a job placement counselor with the Roanoke school system.
Her primary duty will be to develop marketing and recruitment strategies for women, but she will not be the only admissions officer recruiting women.
VMI hopes to recruit a "critical mass" of 30 women for next fall's freshman class.
Reddings was the only candidate considered for the job, said Col. Vernon Beitzel, VMI director of admissions. Beitzel hired Reddings at Radford in 1991, when he was director of admissions there. He invited Reddings to apply at VMI.
"She was looking for a challenge, and she's going to find it," Beitzel said.
As Reddings sees it, that challenge will be "helping young women to understand the entire VMI experience and how it relates to women just as it has always related to men."
Another hard part: "Getting them to believe it will be fair and equitable." If she didn't believe that herself, she couldn't do her job effectively, she said.
It's a moot point now, she said, but Reddings said she believed all along that women should have VMI among their higher-education choices.
The first women at VMI, Reddings said, will have to know what they are getting into and be especially driven to survive. They are, after all, breaking the gender barrier, though Reddings notes that it is a traditional barrier, and not an intentional one, such as when the first black cadets were admitted to VMI in 1968.
Reddings dealt with a few barriers of her own as a black woman working in insurance and banking before getting into education.
"I never saw myself as black against white or Hispanic or anything else out there," she said. "I tried very hard not to focus on issues of race, of gender, of class. What people remember about you is your integrity, your honesty."
That's a message she thinks might benefit the first women at VMI.
So far, 226 women, 158 of whom are high school seniors, have inquired about attending VMI, Beitzel said. More than half are Virginians, and most have an interest in ROTC and the military, Beitzel said.
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Terri Wheaton Reddings is set to be VMI's firstby CNBfemale admissions officer. color.