The Thin Gray Gender Line

By EMILY MITCHELL

The all-male Virginia Military Institute was faring better than the beleaguered Boy Scouts last week. A federal judge ruled that the elite college, which has maintained a single-sex admissions policy since its founding in 1839, could continue to discriminate. "V.M.I. truly marches to the beat of a different drummer," concluded Judge Jackson L. Kiser, "and I will permit it to continue to do so."

The Justice Department brought suit against V.M.I. 16 months ago, claiming that exclusion of women from the state school was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause. After hearing arguments in April, Judge Kiser, who got his law degree from Washington and Lee University 33 years before it became coed, found that as a single-sex school V.M.I. adds important diversity to Virginia's education system that would be lost if women joined the 1,350-strong cadet corps. The Justice Department has two months to appeal.

This decision goes against a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that forbids gender discrimination in schools receiving federal or state funds. In that case, the Justices said, a tax-supported female nursing school in Mississippi could not refuse to enroll men, since a single-sex policy was not necessary to achieve an important educational goal. Citing the Mississippi case, Judge Kiser concluded that V.M.I.'s goals would be thwarted if women were admitted. His ruling, complained Ellen Vargyas, senior counsel for the National Women's Law Center, turns the 1982 precedent "upside down."

V.M.I., which receives $9 million annually from the state -- a third of its budget -- is an old-fashioned military school, but only about 15% of its graduates enter the armed forces. The majority move smoothly into the Old Dominion's most powerful business and political ranks. Barring women from the school effectively curtails their access to that old-boy network.

In his 21-page opinion, Judge Kiser took note of the school's traditions. V.M.I.'s freshman-class members -- the "rats" as they are called -- are hazed unmercifully, forced to live under Spartan conditions and confronted with demeaning physical demands. Kiser observed that the "rat line" creates a "bonding to their fellow sufferers and former tormentors." Any changes made in the rat line to accommodate women, he said, would thwart the college's mission.

If V.M.I. were a private institution, it would be as free to keep out women as it is to require every cadet to snap a morning salute in front of a bronze statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who taught there from 1851 to 1861. "We're not talking about whether there is a role for single-sex education," says Vargyas. "The real question is, Can the brother rats have male bonding with tax money from the state of Virginia?" In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, in which women died alongside men for their country, Judge Kiser's ruling seems rather jarring -- especially since female taxpayers help pay for V.M.I.'s different drummer.

With reporting by Julie Johnson/Washington