High Court Ends Men-Only At Virginia Military Institute

In a ruling that makes it harder for educational institutions to discriminate on the basis of gender, the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday toppled the Virginia Military Institute’s 157-year-old tradition of excluding women.

By a 7-1 vote, the court declared that the state had failed to produce any “exceedingly persuasive justification” for its men-only admissions policy and that the policy violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Justice Clarence Thomas did not participate in the ruling because his son attends the school.

Moreover, the court ruled that a parallel military program the state established for women last fall, the Virginia Institute for Leadership, amounted to a “pale shadow” of the men’s institute in terms of academic choice, faculty stature, funding, prestige, alumni support and influence.

The landmark ruling, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, clearly outlawed the use of gender-based stereotypes to justify discrimination.

Wednesday’s ruling has no immediate impact on private same-sex colleges. But Ron Rotunda, a University of Illinois law professor, said the decision could bring challenges to recent educational experiments, such as single-sex public schools for minorities.

Ginsburg emphasized that VMI’s mission to produce “citizen-soldiers” is “not substantially advanced by women’s categorical exclusion, in total disregard of their individual merit, from the state’s premier citizen-soldier corps.”

“However well this plan serves Virginia’s sons,” she said, “it makes no provision for her daughters.”

The majority opinion stressed that “state actors controlling gates of opportunity may not exclude qualified individuals based on ‘fixed notions’ concerning the roles and abilities of males and females.”

Among the arguments the state of Virginia had raised in defense of VMI’s male-only policy was that its physically rigorous and “adversative” approach to education would have to be modified if women were admitted.

The decision drew praise from officials at the Justice Department, which had sued Virginia and VMI in 1990 on behalf of a female high school student who had sought admission.

Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the ruling will bolster the department’s case against The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., the nation’s only other state-supported men’s college.

“This decision basically rejects every legal and factual argument made by The Citadel,” said Harry Weisberg, who represented Shannon Faulkner, the woman who successfully challenged the school’s male-only admissions policies. Last year a lower court forced the military college to admit Faulkner, who dropped out after a week.