The last of the old corps? - federal suit against Virginia Military Institute for refusing to admit women

National Review, August 6, 1990

IN MAY 15,1864, a small band of boy-cadets from the Virginia Military Institute having marched north from their school barracks in Lexington, Va., joined Confederate forces under General John C. Breekinridge facing Federal forces coming down the Shenandoah Valley. In the ensuing Battle of New Market, ten cadets were killed and many wounded. Some weeks later, when Federal forces finally occupied Lexington, they burned the VMI barracks. Even a Union soldier of the time was saddened; on June 14, 1864, Sidney Marhn wrote to his wife: This is a nice place.... There was a milatary school here but we have burnt all the buildings. It was a pitty to do it but I suppose it could not be helped."

Today, yet again, VMI is under Federal assault, this time by the forces of the Bush Administration. The Justice Department, responding to the vengeful egalitarian agenda of the feminist movement, is demanding that VMI admit women to its ranks. For the small school slightly over one thousand cadets) that has sought since its inception in 1839 to produce a special breed of citizen-soldier," the encounter could be more devastating than the one of which Sidney Marlin wrote.

The present VMI-Federal confrontation began last year when an as-yetunidentified female student wrote the Justice Department complaining that she could not attend the historic school on the hill because of its allmale tradition. President Bush's attorney general, Richard Thornburgh, entered the fray and began issuing threats. In January he sent letters to Virginia's newly elected governor, Douglas Wilder (since VMI is a state school), and to the VMI Board of Visitors ordering them to come up with a plan for admitting women or be sued by the Justice Department for violating the Fourteenth Amendment.

Governor Wilder, aware of the highly emotional attachment VMI alumni have to their school, took the high ground: he would let the VMI Board decide whether to yield or to stand and fight. Interestingly, Virginia's female attorney general, Mary Sue Terry, said she would defend VMI's position if the school chose to fight, as indeed it did. Instead of yielding to the Thornburgh ultimatum, Miss Terry, the VMI Board, and the VMI Foundation (the school's private fundraising arm) initiated two lawsuits of their own on February 5. The suit brought by Miss Terry and the Board argued that VMI was a necessary and distinctive part of the state's diverse system of higher education and that "women are not denied equal opportunity by VMI's admission policy," for there is a coed military corps of cadets at nearby Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The VMI Foundation suit took a slightly different approach, stating that "the forced admission of women will eliminate the option of a unique undergraduate experience for men, while providing no increased educational opportunities for women."

VMI has developed a system of training, the so-called "Rat" system that produces a remarkable male-bonding experience achieved by a common ordeal of rigorous training. VMI's Rats (the term applied to all first-year cadets in the corps) not only undergo serious physical demands; the system extends to every aspect of barracks life. Rats room together, share common shower facilities, live in curtainless rooms always open to an inspector's eyes. Women at VMI would by necessity be treated differently in these respects, and some physical requirements would have to be altered, as they have been at America's national service academies and, incidentally, at those in Great Britain and France.

In addition to the bonding that occurs within each Rat class, there is also a bond developed between the Rats and the First Classmen (seniors) of each year. Each Rat serves as a "dyke" to a First Classman, helping that upper classman get "dyked out" for parade and performing other menial tasks. The First Classman, in turn, gives the younger cadet advice and an example. Doubtless, female cadets would have to be exempted from this system (and some of them might object to the terminology itself). Yet, it is an integral part of the VMI experience.

Virginia's leading political figures have tried to avoid being entangled in the VMI-Federal confrontation. Virginia's present senators are, after all, more creatures of Beltway Washington than true Virginia products. There is Democrat Charles Robb, whose eyes are on a future presidential bid-thus he is anxious not to rile women voters in his party. Then there is Republican John Warner, who told VMI alumni that the national-service academies had dealt with coeducation and they could too, which demonstrated an insensitivity to state tradition comparable to his waffling a year earlier on whether the Manassas battlefield ought to be developed as a shopping mall.

Then too, there is the larger issue of whether all public-supported institutions of higher learning must adhere to a rigid, conformist pattern. Indeed, even private colleges may have to join the march to homogenization, since, in an era where the majority of students receive federal aid, there may be no truly "private" schools left.