THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 29, 1996 TAG: 9606290011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Will
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 84 lines
'Twas a famous victory women won last week. The Supreme Court gave them the right to enroll in an educational institution which, the moment they enter it, will essentially cease to exist.
Virginia Military Institute's men-only admission policy was put on a path to extinction 14 years ago when the Court held that men denied admission to Mississippi University for Women's nursing program were denied what the Constitution promises, ``equal protection of the laws.'' After the Court's ruling against VMI's male-only admissions policy, it is probable that all single-sex public education has been put on the path to extinction by the logic of the Court's VMI ruling. So perhaps have all private single-sex institutions of higher education that receive significant government aid. (Such aid provides an average of almost 20 percent of their budgets - not counting direct-government aid to students.)
In the hands of any willful Supreme Court - and the judiciary is not becoming less willful - the logic may forbid single-sex classes or sports teams in public schools, and government support for such single-sex programs as shelters for battered women and boot camps for young male offenders. What else? We will know when our robed masters tell us what single-sex programs have ``exceedingly persuasive'' justifications. The VMI ruling establishes that vacuity as the judiciary's latest ``standard.''
VMI, one of Virginia's 15 publicly supported colleges and universities, enrolls just 1,300 of the 160,000 students in the state's public higher-education system. It features an ``adversative'' education system emphasizing physical rigor, mental stress, military etiquette, absence of privacy and minute regulation of behavior. Virginia's attempt to shield VMI from the ``equal protection'' challenge by creating at a women's college an analogous program for women was implausible.
Justice Ginsburg, writing for the court and joined by Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter and Breyer (Rehnquist concurred separately and Thomas did not participate because his son attends VMI), sought to portray the ruling as narrow by emphasizing VMI's uniqueness - its special prestige and its origins in 1839 in a context of male chauvinist stereotypes about women. Purging society of unacceptable stereotypes is the point of the court's ruling. The court engaged less in construing the Constitution than in what is called ``consciousness-raising.''
Justice Scalia, dissenting, said the majority believes, against considerable evidence, that no substantial educational value is served by all-male military academies. He said inherently ambiguous constitutional texts such as the equal-protection guarantee should be construed in ways that reflect respect for ``constant and unbroken national traditions'' such as educational diversity that includes some single-sex schools, including male-only military schools.
He noted that the majority criticized the ``fixed notions'' of our forebears regarding women's education, but that the majority favors its own notions so fixedly that it fixes them as constitutional mandates. He notes that the majority faults the ``closed-mindedness'' of our forebears regarding women, but the majority wields judicial power to abort the system of democratic persuasion by which the public's mind is kept open, and changed:
``That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the court's criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter-majoritarian preferences of the society's law-trained elite) into our Basic Law.''
Earlier this year The New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen interviewed VMI's superintendent, Gen. Josiah Bunting III, a Rhodes scholar and author of an acclaimed novel about his Vietnam experiences. Bunting lamented, ``Our opponents aren't even trying to see this institution as it really is; they're not interested in what Coleridge called `imaginative sympathy.'''
Rosen wrote that ``almost everyone concedes'' that women will never benefit from VMI's distinctive virtues because with the admission of women, that VMI ``will no longer exist.'' To Rosen, Bunting described the sadness felt by VMI students and graduates about the impending extinction of a 157-year tradition:
``They realize that once it's gone it can never be recovered. Nescit vox missa reverit - the voice which sent can never be recalled. . . . This is everything that is good in our culture, and it's going to change irretrievably if they bring in women.''
The people most pleased by the court's killing of the unique institution for which Bunting mourns are people who describe themselves as defenders of ``diversity'' and ``choice.'' MEMO: Mr. Will's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers
Group, 1150 15th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071. by CNB