DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997                 TAG: 9704090724

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY WILLIAM H. HONAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES 

DATELINE: LEXINGTON                         LENGTH:  146 lines

GUIDING CHANGE AT VMI SUPERINTENDENT MUST CHART PLAN TO BRING FEMALE CADETS INTO ALL-MALE MILITARY SCHOOL.

Ask Si Bunting how he plans to assimilate female cadets at Virginia Military Institute in September and he responds like a soldier accepting a mission in which he believes his chances of survival are not promising.

``I intend to promulgate this order as honorably, efficiently and creditably as it is possible to do,'' says the superintendent of VMI, which last year was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to admit women or lose its public financing.

The prospect of admitting women to the 158-year-old institute, which is famous for calling its plebes ``rats'' and for treating them accordingly, is setting teeth on edge here in Lexington. At the Citadel, VMI's cousin in Charleston, S.C., two of four women withdrew last fall, charging male students with potentially criminal harassment.

And there but for the grace of God goes VMI, some here are saying. Josiah Bunting III, the man charged with pulling off VMI's transition, is a lean, tall 57-year-old, a 1963 graduate of the institute, a Rhodes scholar, a classical pianist, a former president of a women's college, a runner who lopes the 26-mile marathon in less than three hours, the former headmaster of a prestigious prep school and a heavily decorated infantry officer who did not shrink from portraying the Army brass as aloof and pigheaded in his novel about Vietnam, ``The Lionheads.'' A Renaissance man, you say? Bunting prefers to call himself a Victorian.

``Look at what I'm reading,'' he said with boyish enthusiasm, jumping up from his seat in his light, airy office and snatching books from a conference table. ``Look at this! John Henry Newman on `The Idea of a University,' Emerson's essays, the Life of Gladstone, Milton's Complete Poems, F.R. Leavis - a great critic - Aristotle's `Rhetoric,' Edward Gibbon.''

``Yes. Sure. I'm a Victorian,'' he continued. ``I believe you can improve people's character while educating them. Pick up the typical college catalogue and what do you see? On the first two or three pages they talk about character and citizenship, and then you get 400 pages of course description. Are they serious about developing character and citizenship? You don't get that impression. I'm out of joint with virtually everything in modern education.''

Gen. Bunting (his rank was conferred by Gov. George F. Allen in connection with his VMI post) makes no secret of the fact that he previously opposed the idea of admitting women to VMI. In 1994, a year before he assumed his post, he wrote in a widely reprinted article that VMI had as much right to remain all-male as Wellesley College did to remain all-female.

He still firmly believes, he said, that the 9-to-8 decision by VMI trustees to admit women to maintain public support ``puts at risk a chemistry which has been quite useful and has worked out well.'' He quoted Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, David Riesman, Mary McCarthy and several other eminent writers to back up his view that the special virtue of American higher education is that it has sustained ``a multiplicity of small colleges, each with its own special character.''

``The particular genius of VMI,'' he continued, ``has been to put together young men in their adolescence when they are particularly susceptible to romantic appeals to testing their manhood through military service or danger or shared adventure alongside other young men. Women have different feelings. I don't think those experiences are available to them.'' But, the Supreme Court has spoken - and so be it.

``We have other things to offer young women,'' he said. ``We have a strong academic program, a very traditional way of educating people which tends to test their personal abilities, and a good way to earn a commission in the armed forces. These are a collection of opportunities that appeal to women.''

Another thing that will help him to make co-education work, Bunting said, is his prior experience in education. For eight years, he was headmaster of the Lawrenceville School, an elite prep school outside of Princeton, N.J., that admitted women after 175 years as an all-male preserve.

``I was the first headmaster at Lawrenceville to be there when the women arrived in 1987,'' he said. ``One thing I learned that will be useful here at VMI is that young women under pressure - much more so than young men - are particularly prone to eating disorders. You have to watch out for the danger signals.'' VMI, he said, is now hiring a full-time women's counselor.

During the decade before Lawrenceville, Bunting was president of Hampden-Sydney College, an all-male school near Farmville. But in the early 1970s, he led the all-women's Briarcliff College in Briarcliff, N.Y.

The general says he also has gotten the benefit of the Citadel's experience. He was shocked by the reports of the abusive hazing of the two women who recently resigned from the school, he said, but he learned important lessons. ``It's a little bit like having someone cross a minefield a hundred yards ahead of you - you learn what to avoid.''

And after he found out that some women at the Citadel had suffered pelvic stress fractures that may have occurred while marching, he decided that VMI will assign most incoming women to units composed of shorter men. ``They'll be able to take a shorter stride without stress,'' he said.

He said one of the most important lessons he absorbed is that no previously all-male military school can carry out a major change like the admission of women with just a handful of female cadets. When Shannon Faulkner left the Citadel soon after enrolling as the first woman in 1995, he noted, she cited stress and her isolation as the only woman in the corps.

``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. At the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he 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.''

To avoid this pitfall, Bunting has had his staff recruiting around the country so that VMI will start in September with 35 to 40 highly qualified women in a class of 1,360.

Furthermore, he decided, given the rigors of ``plebe'' life, these women shouldn't all be freshmen. Consequently, VMI recruiters have worked out an exchange program with two other military colleges - Norwich University in Northfield, Vt., and the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The net effect will be to provide VMI with a handful of women in upper-class ranks where they may serve as mentors.

Despite Bunting's determination, some have their doubts about how successful the school will be in assimilating women.

Emilie Miller, a former Virginia State senator who proposed in 1990 that women be admitted to VMI, is skeptical of the general's ability to oversee a successful transition. ``Can he forget he is a VMI alumni?'' asked Miller, who lost her seat in 1991 after angry VMI alumni helped campaign against her. ``Are those young men going to be given sensitivity training?''

Mike Strickler, a VMI spokesman (and graduate), makes it clear that all incoming freshmen will ``continue to be treated in a way that is mentally and physically stressful. We expect to preserve that.''

Asked if he would send his daughters to VMI, Bunting said he would ``neither encourage nor discourage them.'' The general and his wife, Diana, and their teen-age son and daughter, Charles and Alexandra, live in a house that is only 200 feet from the barracks. (The Buntings have two older children, Elizabeth and Josiah, who live, respectively, in Washington and San Francisco.) And his academic regimen has a rigor of its own.

He is customarily present at the reveille formation at 6:50 a.m., and at least two mornings a week he has breakfast with cadets in the mess hall. Later, he may meet with alumni or faculty members - or drive a few hours to Richmond to talk with state legislators: Virginia provides 34 percent of VMI's $35 million annual operating budget. Afternoons are generally occupied with faculty, staff or legal meetings that are usually concerned, these days, with the advent of female cadets.

Late at night, or sometimes before dawn, the general writes. (In 1973, Time magazine named ``The Lionheads,'' his novel, one of the year's 10 best.) Now he is working on a nonfiction book on the ideal university.

And two mornings a week, Bunting teaches a course of his own design called ``Victorian Prose,'' in which the cadets read and discuss selections from Darwin and Macaulay, among others. ``The Victorians had many of the problems that we have today,'' he said. ``Theirs, too, was a period of rapid change in which they feared being overwhelmed by it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

Superintendent Josiah Bunting KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY VMI WOMEN

IN THE MILITARY MILITARY SCHOOLS MILITARY ACADEMIES

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