The bugler trumpeted the changing of the guard at Virginia Military Institute late on a warm, midwinter afternoon as the setting sun cast a golden glow over the Allegheny Mountains onto the old Gothic barracks.
The scene wasn`t much different from what it was 150 years ago, when 23 young Virginians took over guard duty from soldiers at the Lexington arsenal and became the first class of cadets.
VMI cadets stand guard where Thomas Jonathan ”Stonewall” Jackson, the Civil War general and VMI physics professor, mustered cadets to train troops for the Confederate Army.
They follow the steps of George C. Marshall, class of 1901, who manned the same guard post before he went on to become Army Chief of Staff during World War II and author of the plan to rescue Western Europe after the war.
It was a cadet guard who recently challenged a woman journalist trying to cross the sacred line under the Jackson Arch that marks the transition from the outside world into the exclusively male world of VMI.
In a time when old-fashioned barriers to race, sex and ideology are crumbling around the world, VMI remains a bastion of masculine tradition. Women have been banned from the ranks of its Corps of Cadets since its beginning, and the school seems determined to maintain the status quo.
The U.S. Justice Department says the Constitution and law require the state college to accept women and has ordered the school to do so. But the cadets and the school seem as bent on protecting their all-male tradition as their predecessors.
Virginia`s attorney general and the VMI Foundation, which oversees the school`s endowment, have filed suit against the government, seeking to overturn the mandated integration. The Justice Department, in turn, has vowed to continue the fight in responding to the legal sabers.
Privacy is nonexistent
The heart and the soul of VMI`s all-male world are the barracks that lie just beyond the Jackson Arch. Unlocked doors and uncovered windows, communal showers and doorless toilet stalls open to a central yard. Privacy is nonexistent.
”The barracks is the focal point of a cadet`s life at VMI,” says the school`s catalogue, ”and the fact that all cadets are required to live under one roof facilitates student government and helps promote and strengthen ties of friendship.”
All VMI cadets, from the lowliest first-year Rats to the rich and influential alumni, are bound in their barracks` experience. All are brother Rats, and they don`t want any sisters.
Steve Hunter is a Rat.
There is no vermin lower than he and his fellow freshmen, the latest inductees into the corps of Brother Rats at VMI.
As a shaved-head rat, he must follow the ”rat line,” literally a prescribed course through the barracks and figuratively a code of conduct.
He must walk in ”the strain”: chin tightly pulled in, his eyes trained steely ahead even while climbing stairs at doubletime or reading announcements off the chalk board, fists clenched, arms squeezed to his sides so that no daylight shows, chest stuck out and shoulders thrown back.
Every turn is precise enough to measure with a protractor.
And, most of all, he must remember his place. ”Move!” he`ll be commanded if he`s in the way of an older cadet. He`ll move.
He must be ready at the command of upperclassmen to recite the day`s menu or a random excerpt from the ”rat`s bible,” the 64-page palm-sized handbook containing VMI lore, school songs and, most important, the Code of a Gentleman. If he can`t, he`ll be ordered to drop and do 20 pushups. If he sees a Brother Rat doing pushups on the concrete, he must drop and do the same out of brotherly love.
Verbal chastising delivered nose to nose can come any time. He`ll try to keep his room immaculate and belongings well-ordered. The inspectors will always find something wrong. Demerits will result.
In the mess hall, he gets to sit perched on the front three inches of the chair, knees clamped, head down in obeisance, unable to look up from the plate.
And he must endure the inevitable and unannounced sweat party, 15 minutes of intense and grueling exercise in comradeship with his Brother Rats described as ”shock treatment.”
On top of the indocrination come six days of college classes each week, the regimented hours, the drilling, a military regimen that the school catalogue says creates ”young men prepared to assume leadership roles,” even though most graduates decide not to enter military service.
`Why am I doing this?`
Hunter was indocrinated into the VMI tradition by an alumnus who was the father of a girlfriend in his hometown of Blacksburg, Va. ”We would sit around and look at the yearbook and hear the stories,” recalled Hunter.
”He`s always proud whenever he talks about his school, his classmates.”
But no storytelling can prepare a teenager for the rat line. The mental strain more than the physical tests has challenged Hunter. ”Why am I doing this?” he says he has asked himself and others more than once.
”Why be here? It`s so unexplainable until you do it. Now, I`m 19 years old. I have no hair. I`m walking around when you`re `strained` looking kind of stupid. Why am I doing all of this? Is there a reason? Is it worth it?
” `It really is.` That`s what they tell you. `It really is.` ”
As the rat line for this class neared its end, Hunter had concluded that, indeed, ”it`s worth it,” knowing that ”it`s that little extra step that you take that sometimes pays off.”
A Sister Rat, however, would have ruined the experience, Hunter believes. ”There`s no way it could be the same,” he said, if women are allowed to join the Corps of Cadets.
A pre-emptive strike
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department believes otherwise. In a letter to Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, the school had been given until last week to abandon its single-sex admission policy and develop a plan to recruit women cadets.
In response, Wilder, who broke tradition when he became the first black governor elected in the U.S. since Reconstruction, said his personal view ”is of no moment” and wrote U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh that the matter is up to the school`s governing authority, the Board of Visitors.
In what legal authorities called a pre-emptive strike, Virginia Atty. Gen. Mary Sue Terry, who also broke tradition as the state`s first woman attorney general, filed suit on behalf of the school to prevent the federally ordered integration.
The VMI Foundation, which administers an endowment of over $100 million, most contributed by alumni, also filed suit against the Justice Department.
Rather than file its own suit as threatened in its letter, the Justice Department decided on Feb. 16 that for the time being it will argue its case by responding to the actions filed by the school and its alumni.
Terry`s brief argued that women are not denied equal educational opportunity because of Virginia`s rich mix of public and private colleges. They include five private women`s schools and one private men`s school.
And there is also a state university, Virginia Polytechnical Institute in Blacksburg, among whose 22,000 civilian students is a 500-member Corps of Cadets including 70 women.
But John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University`s Project on Sex Discrimination, said Terry`s position is ”really nothing more than the separate but equal argument” which the U.S. Supreme Court rejected when it ordered schools to be racially integrated in the 1950s.
Banzhaf has filed a complaint against another all-male, military state school, the Citadel, in Charleston, S.C. The Justice Department said it will act soon on the complaint.
Women as inferiors
It`s hard to find a VMI cadet who doesn`t believe that VMI should be left alone.
”I don`t want to sound like a chauvinist,” said James Wanovich, 21, while getting his already short hair trimmed in the school`s barber shop. ”If a young lady wants to come here, that`s going to change the experience and the institution, and I`m really not in favor of that.”
Steve Linder, 22, changing into his gym ”dyke” in his spartanly furnished room with no cover on the glass door, said, ”Everybody is here living as one, getting along every day with each other, no shades on the windows. If she comes, there`s going to be shades and locks put on the doors. She may not even be in the barracks. I think that will break the unification. Then I think there will be problems with our strong honor code.”
In VMI terminology, every uniform is a ”dyke,” and the rat assigned to a senior to perform menial chores is called his ”dyke.”
”If she wants to be my dyke and come in and wake me up and roll my hay
(mattress) in the morning, if she wants to (walk in the) `strain`
(position) and get her hair shaved, that`s all right with me,” Jon Milner, 21, a junior from Lumberton, N.J., said facetiously.
More seriously, Milner also emphasized that women can join Virginia Tech`s coeducational cadet corps. He asked, ”Aren`t you discriminating against me if I`m not allowed to attend an all-male military school in Virginia? Don`t I get rights? This really irritates me.”
Milner admitted that the VMI traditions bind alumni into ”an old boy network” of big contributors, many of whom hold important positions in Virginia.
State Sen. Emilie Miller, a Democrat who represents Fairfax, Va., ran smack into the network in a legislative committee when she tried to get a bill heard that would force VMI to accept women. The bill was ruled out of order by the committee chairman, who happened to be the only VMI graduate in the General Assembly and who also was campaign treasurer for the state attorney general.
”Tradition is fine, but it`s time to move on,” said Miller, a Chicago native who moved to Virginia in 1962. ”To say that VMI`s experience is to graduate leaders is to say that women are not leaders. They are turning out men who look upon women as inferior. That is not a tradition I want to continue.”
Sharing latrines
Rob Clark, 22, a senior who upon graduation expects to be in a missle launch site for the Air Force, serving with women officers, said he is not sure women have the stamina to endure the rat line or face-to-face combat.
”There`s obviously a few woman who could succeed” at VMI, he said, but proportionately far more men could.
Maj. Gen. Stanton Musser, commandant of cadets at Virginia Tech, saw the integration of women firsthand at the Air Force Academy. He was vice commandant there when women first joined the nation`s military academies in 1975-76.
Integrating women into the cadet corps at Virginia Tech, which occurred in 1973, even before the military academies, works because the administration is behind it, the general said. ”It`s the tone set at the top and that`s got to flow down, particularly through the cadet chain of command,” he said.
Women at Virginia Tech share a dormitory with the men but not rooms. They use the same latrines but slap a ”female” sign on the door when they`re inside.
The bonding among cadets still occurs, Gen. Musser said, quoting a conversation he recently had with one woman cadet: ”Her big pitch was how close she and her buds are. The camaraderie is still there.”
He said he`s making no judgment on the VMI case ”because I`ll take all the women they don`t want.”
Bayonets and battle ribbon
There was another time when Washington tried to impose its will on Virginia, and that`s also part of the VMI tradition. In 1864, 10 cadets were killed and 47 wounded in the Battle of New Market that the Union Army lost. But a month later Union troops shelled and burned the school.
The cadet-grey, heavy wool uniforms are in the style of Confederate uniforms. The tails on the dress coatee are cut, not hemmed, in remembrance of the bandages VMI cadets tore from their cloaks while fighting during the Civil War.
Their ancestors having served in battle, only VMI cadets and no other military academy can fix bayonets to their rifles and only they have a battle ribbon to attach to their U.S. flag.
There`s one other tradition that the war should have taught VMI: Survival in the face of adversity. Even after the ultimate Confederate loss to the federal authorities in Washington, VMI rose from the ashes and thrived. Win or lose its current battle, VMI will survive, traditions intact, a guard on duty, even if it`s a woman.
