Virginia Military’s Ban on Women Upheld : Law: A federal judge says the college ‘marches to a different drummer.’ The Justice Department had filed suit to halt the 152-year-old policy.

In a setback for women’s rights advocates, a federal judge said in a ruling made public Monday that the Virginia Military Institute can continue its men-only admissions policy because the state-supported school “marches to the beat of a different drummer.”

U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser rejected U.S. Justice Department arguments that the exclusion of women at a public college receiving state and federal funding violates the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause.

The Justice Department filed suit last year on behalf of a female Virginia high school student who was refused admission to VMI. The institute’s ban against women has been in effect since the school opened in 1839.

The ruling, filed Friday in Danville, Va., and released in Roanoke, Va., on Monday, followed nearly three months of courtroom battles centering on the biological and sociological differences between men and women. The ruling incensed women’s rights activists and likely will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kiser asserted that VMI’s 152-year-old policy provided a needed diversity in education and that changing the policy would alter the school’s mission.

The 1,300-cadet school, situated in Lexington, Va., “has set its eye on the citizen-soldier and never veered from the path it has chosen to meet that goal,” the judge said.

“VMI truly marches to the beat of a different drummer, and I will permit it to continue to do so.”

Kiser’s ruling means that VMI will remain one of only two all-male state-supported colleges in the nation. The other is The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

VMI officials said the state contributes $9 million a year to the school, about a third of its budget.

At the Justice Department, spokeswoman Amy Casner said the department would have no comment until lawyers studied the ruling.

In a statement, Maj. Gen. John W. Knapp, superintendent of VMI, said he was “delighted” with the judge’s decision, adding: “We look forward to continuing our exemplary service to the nation and to the Commonwealth.”

Lt. Gen. Claudius E. Watts III, president of The Citadel, said that “a very dark cloud has been lifted from VMI and The Citadel.” He said he hopes the VMI ruling will discourage any lawsuit against The Citadel.

But Patricia Ireland, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, called the ruling “a slap in the face” for the thousands of female veterans of the Persian Gulf War, adding that it sends a message that “women aren’t full citizens and can’t be full soldiers.”

During the non-jury trial, held April 4-11, Judith Keith, a Justice Department attorney, argued that women “are being denied admission by a tradition based on stereotypical, archaic notions of the proper roles of what women should be. VMI just does not want women there.”

VMI attorneys called witnesses who testified that admissions likely would drop if women were admitted, and a VMI attorney, Robert Patterson, argued that the school should receive “the same protection as the spotted owl and six-legged salamander.”

Kiser agreed that the school deserved protection from policy changes.

He declared that letting women in “would tend to impair the esprit de corps and the egalitarian atmosphere which are critical elements of the VMI experience.”

“In fact,” the judge said, “it would be impossible for a female to participate in the VMI experience. Even if the female could physically and psychologically undergo the rigors of the life of a male cadet, her introduction into the process would change it.”

Such comments struck Ireland as another example of the “classic ol’ boy network.” Noting that most VMI graduates do not go into the military and join businesses and other civilian employers instead, Ireland asserted that the ruling represents “economic and political exclusion.”

Seizing on the judge’s words, she said VMI “is marching to the same old beat of discrimination, and that has to be stopped.”

Researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.