Exactly 100 years after his departure, in 2001, VMI will graduate its first women. Among those who have applied, the first four were selected just this week. They will enroll here next August, and like their Brother Rats, they will find the institute in its essential unchanged from a century ago. Many people profess to find this appalling; I find it wonderful. And we are determined to sustain and strengthen those essential in a college that will enroll both women and men. For us to do less would not only be to break faith with a living heritage that proves and re-proves its worth daily in the lives of 15,000 graduates; it would also be to demean the character and aspirations of the young women who will enroll as cadets. Uniformly, our first female applicants are telling us that they would not have applied to the institute had we not affirmed our determination to retain the “infamous” features of the VMI system, a system that seems to me to be directly antipathetic to much of what contemporary culture celebrates.
The media present VMI as the equivalent of marine boot camp, only harsher. The school is routinely labeled as “defiant” because it fought for so long to remain an institution for men and because its board took its allotted time to consider whether VMI should become a private college. In fact, our long struggle was principled, most carefully wrought and undertaken to preserve an enterprise whose efficiency was not questioned.
The school has a superb tradition of academic and teaching excellence. Presumably it is for this, as well as for its spartan and military culture, that prospective cadets, male and female, apply. As for the Ratline, the “adversative” system, and the deliberate emotional and physical stresses and tests it imposes, these will remain in force as VMI’s means of inculcating qualities of character and behavior in those who choose to join it. In our system all who enroll are reduced at once to a culture of utter equality: race, birth, money, prior attainment mean nothing. All new cadets are thrown exclusively upon their own resources of determination, guts and wit. An honor system, honorably enforced, imposes only one penalty for its breach–immediate dismissal.
The duty day is impossibly long and privacy and leisure practically nonexistent. The crowding array of academic and physical–and military–demands seem overwhelming. But each must be answered scrupulously each day. As VMI founder Francis H. Smith said in 1851, “He who has obtained the mastery over himself to meet and discharge the smallest duty has done much to qualify himself for the greatest.”
To change any of these standards or expectations–physical, military or intellectual–to accommodate the enrollment of women at VMI is to compromise exactly what those who apply–male and female–are seeking. The practice of gender-norming, in which different standards are set up for women and men, is most iniquitous of all. There is no gender-norming in the world of affairs to which we are sending our graduates.
It is the intensity–the ferocity, even–of a college’s ethos that makes its lessons, academic and moral, stick to the ribs of its graduates. An obvious premise of VMI’s form of education is found in a forgotten line of Housman poetry: “The trouble s of our proud and angry dust are from eternity and shall not fail.” Wherever, and in whatever professions our graduates may serve, we affirm the unchanging nature of human character and our determination to educate, to mold, to shape, to prepare, to inculcate principles of conduct and habits of living in our young cadets that will equip them to master those troubles that will not fail–women or men–in this or any future age.
Liberal education cultivates and disciplines the mind. It is the sustaining nourishment for a lifetime of vigorous intellectual activity. VMI sets out, deliberately, to mold, to shape character–the essential foundation, or coefficient, we believe, of an undergraduate education. Young women will be welcomed to the institute on the same terms as young men, to serve–and learn from the same curriculum, in the classroom and in barracks.
