Saturday, January 16, 1999   JUDGE ENDS FEDERAL OVERSIGHT OF VMI Friday's ruling officially ends a nine-year legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. By MICHAEL HEMPHILL THE ROANOKE TIMES The civil rights lawsuit that prompted Virginia Military Institute to end its 157-year heritage as a male-only institution was dismissed Friday by a federal judge. In his decision, U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser ruled that VMI has fully complied with a 1996 court order that it open its ranks to women, and thus no longer requires federal oversight. "We feel like we've done a very good job of assimilating women here," said Col. Mike Strickler, VMI's spokesman. "The cadets did a great job. It was up to them to do the job right, and it will remain up to them to do the job right." Friday's ruling officially ends a nine-year legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And VMI hopes the battle won't ever be sparked again. "We will obviously continue to monitor the situation here," Strickler pledged. "It's something at the forefront of our mind. The U.S. Department of Justice filed the lawsuit in 1990 in U.S. District Court in Roanoke after a female high school student from Virginia complained that the military college refused to admit her because of her sex. The lawsuit claimed that the school had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, because it received federal taxpayer money, but barred half the population from admittance. Kiser sided with VMI in dismissing the lawsuit a year later. "VMI is a different type of institution," Kiser said in his opinion. "It has set its eye on the citizen-soldier and never veered from the path it has chosen to meet that goal. VMI truly marches to the beat of a different drummer, and I will permit it to continue to do so." Kiser got a chance to revisit the case in 1994, after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his original decision and directed VMI to go private, admit women, or come up with an alternate parallel plan. Against objections from the Department of Justice and women's groups, Kiser approved a VMI proposal that provided for a publicly funded women's leadership institute at private Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. In 1996, it was the U.S. Supreme Court's turn to weigh in. By a 7-1 majority, the justices ruled that if the state of Virginia chose to bar women from the "premier training" that VMI affords, it would have to do so without federal funding, which amounted to almost half the school's budget. Faced with that reality, the VMI board of visitors, in a 9-8 vote, agreed to admit women in the fall of 1997. Thirty were admitted that year and 34 in 1998. Strickler said the concerns many alumni had about women entering the school have been allayed. "The main thing we did not want to do was change the basics of VMI," he said. "And women have not come here to do that." Officials with the Department of Justice and the National Women's Law Center, which fought VMI's male-only admissions policy from the beginning, couldn't be reached for comment Friday.