DATE: Saturday, August 30, 1997             TAG: 9708300013

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE'S SCORECARD: 26 MEN, 2 WOMEN

The gym where I work out has a chalkboard that is usually filled with pleas for more towels, cooler air conditioning or a remote control for the television set.

But one day this week it bore a smug message of a different sort:

``VMI Scratch Sheet'' it read. Under a column labeled ``Men'' there were 17 hash marks. Under a column labeled ``Women'' there were two.

``Go girls, go,'' someone had scrawled underneath.

Actually, the toteboard was wrong. There should have been 26 marks under the men's column. Two was correct for the women.

I derived a lot of pleasure from that message as I panted through a session on the Stairmaster.

It reassured me that I wasn't the only person who had heaved a sigh of relief when this years' first rat line dropout was a guy. The fact that he fled before even getting his haircut was a source of mild amusement, too. Gosh, even Shannon Faulkner lasted a week at the Citadel.

Of course, the mathematical whizzes among us have already figured out that we have a statistical dead heat for VMI dropouts. Six percent of the boys had dropped out, compared with 6 2/3 percent of the girls. If history is any predictor, by year's end 24 percent of the male rats will run. We'll have to stay tuned to see what happens with the females.

But somehow the sheer number of male dropouts compared with two females seems heartening because some of us suspect that men viciously guard their all-male enclaves because they can't bear the thought of competing with - and losing to - women.

As I gazed with sweaty pleasure at the chalkboard, my mind drifted back to an editorial board meeting we had several years ago with several vociferous VMI alumni. They came to the newspaper to lobby the editorial writers hoping we would favor the single-sex status of VMI.

Red-faced and angry, they declared that the admission of females would be the end of VMI. Girls just weren't suited for such rigors, they sputtered. (Dream on, I wanted to retort). It will never work, they argued. We'll go private before we let women in, they threatened. (And forfeit 34 percent of your annual $35 million operating budget? I don't think so.)

I resisted the urge to pat their beefy hands and tell them not to worry. It mattered little what we wrote in the newspaper anyway; the issue would be decided in the U.S. Supreme Court on points of law and the Consitution, not emotion and editorials.

So now girls are at VMI and apparently holding their own. Ironically, most of the credit must be given to VMI, it's superintendent, Josiah Bunting III, and the schools' board of visitors, which decided if it was going to admit women, it was going to do it right.

Virginians can be proud of the way VMI has tackled integration. None of this Citadel-style nonsense about admitting only one girl and then gloating when she cracked under the pressure. Or admitting just four girls and striking a boys-will-be-boys pose after upperclassmen set the ladies' clothes on fire.

Bunting, who was the first headmaster of the prestigious Lawrenceville Prep School after it went coed, said such small numbers are a recipe for failure.

``You've got to have a genuine cohort - what used to be called a critical mass - to form a support system for all of its members,'' Bunting said in a newspaper interview earlier this year. At the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Bunting said, ``traditionally the number of women has hovered around 8 or 9 percent. Now they're doing better, but that's a depressingly small cohort after 20 years. That's not the way to assimilate women.''

VMI's decision to admit 30 females should be cheered. It's a healthy number - for the first year. Even if a quarter of the girls drop out it would leave a strong support system in place for the remaining cadets.

Like the writer said: Go girls, go. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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