Modernity Arrives at VMI

Virginia Military Institute, an all-male, state-supported military college, can no longer exclude women. The change is long overdue at this public institution, which had been trying to maintain the all-male tradition by offering women separate educational programs. Describing VMI’s alternative program for women as significantly unequal and a “pale shadow” of the men’s program, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the college does not provide equal education.

The high court said the all-male policy violated women’s constitutional right to equal protection. “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 in the 7-1 decision. (Justice Clarence Thomas did not participate because his son attended VMI.) VMI’s state-funded program for women is conducted at the nearby private Mary Baldwin College and emphasizes leadership training instead of the men’s boot-camp-like training. Moreover, the court said, its curricular choices and faculty stature are not comparable to VMI’s.

The ruling also is expected to affect The Citadel, South Carolina’s state-supported all-male military school, which has a similar separate program for women. The Citadel was ordered by a federal court last year to admit a woman, Shannon Faulkner, who dropped out less than a week later.

The lone dissenting justice, Antonin Scalia, said he believed the court ruling would shut off all government support of single-sex education and that some types of classes might be threatened. But private, single-sex colleges are not likely to be affected by Wednesday’s decision. The fact that such a school or its faculty or students receive limited public funds for research or financial aid does not make that school a “public” institution, the courts have ruled.

Opening up VMI may end a tradition but it serves a larger purpose. As Ginsburg wrote, “There is no reason to believe that the admission of women capable of all the activities required of VMI cadets would destroy the institute rather than enhance its capacity to serve the more perfect union.”