ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996 TAG: 9609240049
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
THE DECISION to admit women cadets may have been difficult for Virginia Military Institute's Board of Visitors. The closeness of the board's vote, 9-8, certainly suggests so. But the harder task is ensuring that coeducation works.
If it does, VMI will become a better place than it is today.
Not only would successful coeducation allow the institute to improve itself by selecting cadets from a bigger pool of applicants. It also would improve VMI's ability to prepare cadets for real life in the next century - in work places, for example, where many VMI graduates will have female supervisors.
If, on the other hand, coeducation is allowed to fail, nobody - neither VMI nor the Virginia taxpayers who sustain VMI - will be well-served.
The job of making coeducation work involves more than making the necessary adjustments for separate women's restroom and shower facilities, or window shades in barracks rooms to be pulled for dressing and undressing. Also critical to coeducation's success will be recruiting and retaining enough women cadets to render them genuine parts of VMI life, and not some sort of freakish sideshow.
Encouragingly, Superintendent Josiah Bunting has outlined a plan aimed at making women a significant rather than token presence at VMI. The plan includes not only active recruitment of women students but also efforts to increase the number of women faculty. Certainly at first, and perhaps for as long as VMI is VMI, male cadets will outnumber female cadets. But a critical mass of women must be attained and retained.
Much is being made of VMI officials' stated eagerness not to treat women cadets as a separate category. Some may take this as an expression of petty hostility and vindictiveness. But it doesn't have to be so. Had VMI officials reacted to the decision to go co-ed with a series of patronizing announcements about lowering this and that standard for women, the motivation might have been at least as hostile or more so.
To isolate women from the rigors of cadet life to which male students are subject would be to undermine the egalitarianism that is one of VMI's strengths. It also would run the risk of perpetuating moonlight-and-magnolia myths about women that coeducation could be helpful in shattering.
What matters is VMI's intent: how hard it will try to make coeducation succeed, even if that means - as it must - change in the institution. Indeed, the advent of coeducation offers an opportunity to question which practices serve the educational mission and which do not.
Whether women cadets must have their hair cut as short as men's (VMI says they must), or be required to meet the same physical-training requirements as men (VMI says they will), is debatable. Surely, though, it should be beyond debate that sexual epithets ought to be removed from rat-line rigors, just as racial slurs are (or ought to be) out of bounds. It should be beyond debate that cadet harassment must not edge into sexual harassment.
Justice Department notions of a defiant VMI are, and were, silly. Of course, VMI - and if not VMI, then the state of Virginia - would comply with the Supreme Court's coeducation decision; the issue was whether to do so by going coed or going private. But the acquiescence has been grudging; that needs to change if VMI and the state's taxpayers are to be well-served.
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