THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 23, 1996 TAG: 9609230037
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 54 lines
You may recall the figurine of a bow-legged, unreconstructed Rebel, a Confederate forage cap cocked on his brow, declaring: ``Forget, Hell!''
The tenor of that recalcitrance seems to prevail at Virginia Military Institute even as it accepts the U.S. Supreme Court's order to admit women.
Within two days of the Supreme Court's decree in June, the Citadel was oozing compliance. VMI held out three months until prodded last week by the Justice Department. It agreed Saturday to comply in 1997.
But that is the Virginia way. Time here is more attuned to the seasons' slow wheeling, the leaves turning with deliberate speed, geese migrating to and fro.
And VMI had to satisfy alumni it had tried every way to save its all-male bastion. Even now VMI officialdom accedes with a challenging tone as to how the young women will be received at the Institute.
Federal military academies have a two-tier system of standards in which the number of sit-ups and pull-ups is lower for women.
VMI Superintendent Josiah Bunting III said that women will be required to do six pull-ups, 60 sit-ups in two minutes and run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes. Some of these will be altered, he said, if women can't meet them but can perform other equally rigorous exercises.
VMI's standard plan also calls for women to have their hair cut within a half-inch of their scalps.
In the June 26 decision forcing the school to go coeducational, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that VMI's harsh mental and physical treatment of cadets is ``not inherently unsuitable to women.''
Some women, she noted, can endure the same treatment as men, so they should be able to enroll at VMI if it receives state taxpayer support.
``We are going to take her at her word,'' said VMI President William W. Berry. He noted that many enrolling male cadets can't meet the standards at first but must keep trying. Passage isn't a requirement for graduation.
The women's presence will pose challenges. University of Virginia alumni prated that admission of women would damage The University's ``way of life.'' The chief effect, professors noted later, was to improve the climate of learning.
Women have distinctive strengths. Would that some way could be devised to convey to adolescent males the stamina required to give birth to a child. Before that ordeal most men would quail.
The leavening influence of women at monastic VMI would better prepare male cadets for the workaday world, particularly the military, in which women are fast advancing.
The official hard line is at odds with its sponsoring a women's leadership corps at Mary Baldwin. It also seems out of step with its hitherto chivalrous attitude to women.
Let one Keydette suffer injury through excessive hazing in the rat line and VMI will be answering to the public as well as the court. by CNB