Herban Sprawl

This morning’s paper had an interesting picture in it. A group of V.M.I. cadets were present for a speech by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was on the Supreme Court bench when it was determined that as a public institution, V.M.I. either had to admit women or go private if they wanted public funding. Most of the cadets in this picture were asleep.

I won’t even bother to couch my utter disregard for V.M.I. as a fraternity playing around in soldier uniforms, where hazing is de rigueur. When the case was first being argued, I got into it, during a University of Virginia graduate course, with a classmate whose husband was a Brother Rat. My contention was pretty much what the court ruled: if you want public money, then you have to play by the rules. If you want to remain segregated, then you have to go private. Interestingly enough, there was enough alumni money available to fight the gender equality issue in court, but not enough to take them private. As I said to my classmate, “Separate is never equal, whether we’re referring to race or gender.”

Our teacher, a former priest, sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His mentor, the late Edmund Henderson, had bailed him out of the pokey after a campus sit-in. But the twinkle in his eye spoke volumes.

So the rats were asleep in the auditorium, and they were captured on film and it was published for all the world to see. One wonders whether it was a lack of respect for the woman who had voted to make them accept women into their ranks, or just a refusal to listen and learn.

Justice O’Connor could never be accused of being a total conservative. She was as moderate as they come and she understands the equity issue for women because she was a victim of sexism early in her law career. She made it through Stanford. She had to be pretty bright to manage that in her day! But maybe that’s the problem with the cadets. Maybe their attitude toward women is grudgingly respectful at best. Or perhaps they were up too late in a hazing activity. Whatever the case, there is no excuse for their behavior, and there’s no denying what they did.

The irony is that Justice O’Connor was receiving the Harry F. Byrd Class of 1935 Public Service Award. Harry F. Byrd, the Virginia governor who managed a rather scurrilous machine of Democrats opposed to segregation. Byrd was so against the concept that he wrote the Southern Manifesto in which he condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. He led the losing cause all the way to the point of urging Virginia public schools to close, rather than desegregate. My first two years in the teaching profession were spent in a country elementary school that was built during Byrd’s era of “separate but equal.” Thanks to the liberal injection of funding from Title I., our principal had pulled that little school along very nicely.

My late neighbor, The Colonel, was a V.M.I. alumnus and he once ran for the Senate not because he wanted to be a Senator, he told me, but because he believed fervently that the no opportunity to run against the Byrd machine should ever disregarded. We’re talking 1948 here, long before Brown. I wonder what he would have to say about the somnolent cadets, who were, by the way, both black and white and all male (at least for that picture).