ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 19, 1996 TAG: 9601190038
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
THE U.S. SUPREME Court on Wednesday heard arguments in the Justice Department's challenge to a males-only Virginia Military Institute. Even if the court upholds the constitutionality of VMI's stag status, the policy question will remain:
Why hold tradition-bound VMI exempt from the sometimes painful retrenchment, re-engineering and repositioning for the future occurring at Virginia's other state-owned colleges and universities?
If anything, the policy case for change at VMI may be stronger than the constitutional case. Yet the odds of the high court's deciding against VMI, while perhaps long, seem considerably shorter than the odds of the state's anytime soon giving VMI a choice: modernize or privatize.
Neither we nor anyone else knows how the court will rule. But a definitive judgment against VMI is probably less likely than one in favor. To decide against VMI, the justices could say that (1) segregation by sex is as inherently unequal as segregation by race, or (2) separate-but-equal in single-sex higher education remains theoretically OK, but the new, state-subsidized Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership at Mary Baldwin College doesn't meet the equality standard.
But approach No. 1, adopting the same strict scrutiny for gender-discrimination claims that now applies to race-discrimination issues, ignores educational perspectives that clearly don't apply to race, and raises various other problems - including erosion of the public-private distinction that could imperil the future of America's several-dozen private women's colleges.
As for approach No. 2, the comparability of the Women's Institute to VMI is highly questionable. Lower courts have concluded, however, that the two programs offer comparable opportunities sufficient to get the state of Virginia off the equal-protection hook. The high court may be reluctant to dispute such a finding of fact, though the justices could always turn things back - again - to the lower courts with fresh guidelines for measuring comparability.
For all its twists and turns, the legal battle has never really reached the broader policy question: What justifies VMI's continued existence in present form as a state institution? Nor is this question much asked, perhaps because the narrower legal issue has, outside the courtroom, taken all the attention.
The question is only in part about coeducation. It is also about costliness - VMI's per-student state subsidy is among the highest for undergraduates in Virginia - and about a rat-line philosophy that, however prized as a tradition, may be questionable as a state-sponsored education serving today's and future VMI students.
We have nothing against tradition. But trying to avoid change when the rest of the world is rapidly being transformed will guarantee change in your relations with that world. The political influence of VMI and its alumni, for example, has diminished over the past 50 years - not because VMI is doing anything much different, but because the rest of the state's higher-education system is.
This is certainly not to deny the value of diversity in higher education, or to suggest that VMI should become just another public college.
Something seems a tad off-key, however, about Virginia taxpayers' pouring money into an "adversative" educational system that even the national service academies have jettisoned, along with male-only admissions, as outdated and ineffective. Just as something seems off-key about a state-sponsored all-male VMI in an era when women are increasingly not only wives and mothers but also business colleagues and bosses.
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