Door Opens for Women at VMI

Laurie Asseo

Cavalier Daily

Cavalier Daily

1996-06-27

Door Opens for Women at VMI
WASHINGTON — US. Supreme Court said the all-male Virginia Military Institute must admit women or give up its state funding, ruling 7-1 that a separate program offered to women does not provide equal education.
"Women seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything less, under the state’s obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court.
The ruling also will affect the Citadel, South Carolina’s state military school, which has a similar all-male policy and a similar alternative program for women.
The state-supported VMI’s all-male policy violates women’s constitutional right to equal protection, the high court said.
"Neither the goal of producing citizen-soldiers nor VMI 's implementing methodology is inherently unsuitable to women,” Ginsburg wrote.
"There is no reason to believe that the admission of women capable of all the activities required of VMI would destroy the institute rather than enhance its capacity to serve the more perfect union," she said.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the lone dissenter, wrote, "Today the court shuts down an institution that has served the people of the commonwealth of Virginia with pride and distinction for over a century and a half."
“I do not think any of us, women included, will be better off for its destruction," Scalia said.
"It's not surprising," Gov. George Allen of Virginia said on his monthly show. "We will comply with the opinion."
"It's a great tragedy," said Robert Patterson, a VMI graduate and one of the attorneys who represented VMI.
Even though it ruled against VMI’s all-male tradition, the court turned down the Clinton administration’s bid for a ruling that sex-discrimination cases must be judged by the same strict legal standard used in race-bias cases.
The court kept the mid-level standard it has used in sex- discrimination cases since the mid-1970s. Government can treat the sexes differently if such treatment is substantially related to an important objective, the-court said.
The federal government sued VMI and Virginia in 1990,l contending the all-male policy in effect since school’s founding in 1839 unlawfully discriminates women.
Tbc government relied partly on a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, authored by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. that said Mississippi could not bar men from a state-supported nursing school.
Lawyers for VMI and Virginia argued that admitting women would destroy VMI’s harsh training program. They said some men and women benefit from single-sex education, a ruling against VMI could doom government aid to private, single-sex schools.
A federal judge approved Virginia’s plan to keep out of VMI by creating a separate program for them at Mary Baldwin College, a private women's school in Staunton, Va. The program emphasizes leadership training instead of VMI’s “rat-line” similar to a military boot camp.
The 4th U.S Circuit Court of appeals upheld the plan on the ground that opportunities offered to the two sexes should be “substantively comparable” but need not be the same.
Today, the Supreme Court reversed that ruling.
Ginsburg’s opinion was joined by O’Connor and Justice John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.