THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606280003
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 53 lines
And so the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken: It appears that the Virginia Military Institute's Class of 2000 will be the final all-male class of cadets to graduate from the Lexington school.
After a regrettable $14 million legal battle VMI has been told that as a state college it must end its 157-year-long tradition of admitting only men.
Supporters of VMI are stunned by the 7 to 1 vote to end the single-sex policy at the school. But there is a very good reason why the Court voted overwhelmingly to end the policy: It was wrong.
The lopsided vote in the case shows it was not a hard decision for the Court and indeed to have held for VMI would have required the Court to ignore a long string of its own precedents.
It is legally indefensible for a state-supported institution, which offers a unique educational opportunity, to exclude half of the state's high-school seniors simply because of their gender. Virginia admitted as much when it created the Virginia Women's Institute of Leadership at Mary Baldwin College last year in an embarrassing display of 1990s-style separate-but-unequal.
In its decision, the Supreme Court handled the potentially explosive issue of single-sex education deftly. It left room for all-male or all-female public schools under certain conditions and excluded private schools from the ruling.
The 38 coeds at Mary Baldwin's leadership institute may have been getting a wonderful education, but they were not being afforded equal protection with Virginia males, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
There is talk of VMI now becoming a private school. That's unlikely. The cost of buying the historic buildings and property from the state would be astronomical. And how would the many cadets of modest means and their families afford the steep tuition the school would be forced to charge?
VMI officials have said repeatedly that they are concerned about how women would change the character of the place. Yet the character of VMI would change even more drastically if it were to be transformed into a pricey, all-male, private school for the well-to-do few.
In all probability VMI will grudgingly construct new barracks for women and make other physical changes to the campus to accommodate female cadets in anticipation of their arrival in 1997. The changes will be hard for traditionalists to swallow, but so were those the Institute had to make more than 25 years ago when it began accepting African-American cadets.
And, contrary to some predictions, the school survived integration and even prospered.
Blessed with loyal alumni unlike that at any other school in the world, VMI will go forward with female cadets. The women will no doubt alter the institution a bit, as blacks did when they came.
If VMI is to survive into the 21st Century and its code of honor is to mean anything, it will have to salute and obey the decision of the highest court in the land. by CNB