DATE: Thursday, March 6, 1997               TAG: 9703060293

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL E. RUANE, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   89 lines

STATUS OF MILITARY COLLEGES IN JEOPARDY ARMY PREFERENCE FOR GRADUATES OF VMI, OTHER SCHOOLS, MAY BE RECONSIDERED.

The Army is considering stripping the privileged status of a half-dozen military colleges and programs by denying their graduates preference for active-duty officer jobs.

The Pentagon, military school officials and members of Congress told Knight-Ridder that the Army is considering the change. School officials said that such changes could damage the prestige and traditions of their institutions, and seriously hurt recruiting.

Schools such as Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., would be affected. The change would force their graduates to compete for coveted active-duty slots with the graduates of Army officer-training programs at 301 other colleges around the country.

Though the idea follows bitter controversies over the integration of women at The Citadel and VMI, school officials say they do not believe the Army is seeking to distance itself from them.

The Army is currently wrestling with its own gender problems, in the form of the sexual-harassment scandal at a training center in Aberdeen, Md.

The issue, school officials say, is more a matter of the service seeking what it believes is more equitable competition for the dwindling active-duty slots in the slimmed-down military.

Still, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Willard Scott, executive director of the Association of Military Colleges and Schools, ``Any time you change something that recognizes the uniqueness of these colleges, it gets people a little worked up. There's nothing left that sets them apart as being unique training grounds for young lieutenants.''

In Congress, powerful senators such as John W. Warner, R-Va.; Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.; and Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., a Citadel graduate, have expressed concern.

Said Thurmond: ``I stand with The Citadel and with VMI.''

The decision would affect six schools that are known as the senior, or essential, military schools. Aside from VMI, Virginia Tech and The Citadel, they are Texas A&M, Vermont's Norwich College, and North Georgia College and State University.

Only VMI and The Citadel have military-only programs. The others have students in a cadet corps, as well as non-military students.

And while separate from the nation's three service academies, the six have deep traditions of their own and have produced many illustrious American military figures.

Norwich, for example, was founded in 1819 and is the oldest private military school in the country. VMI, founded in 1839, has links to the famed Confederate general, Thomas J. ``Stonewall'' Jackson, and the World War II statesman, Gen. George C. Marshall.

Traditionally, the Army has all but guaranteed active-duty assignments to the schools' graduates, giving them preference over graduates of the Reserve Officer Training Programs from civilian colleges, even if the cadets have lower grades.

The reason, school officials say, has been that the strict, full-time military regimen at the military schools has been more valued than the part-time ROTC program at civilian schools.

``A VMI cadet is up at 6:10 in the morning,'' said Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting, the superintendent of VMI. ``He lives in a spartan room with two other people and sleeps in a cot. . . . Four years of that is surely worth something in training and habituating people as career soldiers.''

Often, however, military school graduates have significantly lower grades than civilian school graduates.

``We have data . . . that demonstrates that the grade-point average of military school cadets suffers,'' said Maj. Gen. Roger C. Poole, interim president of The Citadel.

He said this is a result of the demanding military routine that does not exist at non-military schools.

``They have less control of their lives,'' he said. ``Twenty-four hours a day we tell them what they're going to do, all day, every day.''

School officials said Sara E. Lister, the Army's assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, is spearheading the re-examination of the policy. She could not be reached for comment, and the Army would say little about the change other than that it was under discussion.

The school officials, though, are worried.

``We have been able to tell young people who come in that they will get active duty time,'' Poole said. ``If we lose our essential military college status, this will probably impact rather heavily on a young person who decides how to get a commission.''

In addition, he said, ``the essential military colleges have served as vital sources of commissionings for the Defense Department for years and years. If that goes away, and if we ever needed to have a mass commissioning program, it might be hard to restart that engine.''

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