Leading the March Into Coeducation A Smiling Major General

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Leading the March Into Coeducation —
A Smiling Major General

Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III takes comfort in the toughness of the school's first women. Nancy Andrews/TWP

LEXINGTON, Va. — Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III pulls up in his Jeep Cherokee and beckons to a young woman walking slowly off the Virginia Military Institute parade ground. Framed by the Jeep's window, he talks to her with the quiet intensity of a confessor and then gives her a clenched fist of encouragement as he drives off.

The woman -- a member of this year's incoming class at VMI -- walks on, picking up her step just a little.

Si Bunting, the idiosyncratic superintendent of VMI, the man whose fierce and elegiac rhetoric had defined VMI's resistance to coeducation since he came to the school in 1995, has a new visage: The 57-year-old smiling public man, walking among his charges, male and female, and fondly urging them forward.

Watching such scenes at a VMI summer school program for incoming freshmen, it is easy to think of Bunting as the dutiful soldier carrying out an order he disagrees with, even detests. Bunting, after all, declared himself "savagely disappointed" at the "killer" 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively forced VMI to open its doors to women after it spent six years in court trying to keep them out.

On Monday, VMI's first coed class -- 32 women and 430 men -- will enroll in the rock-ribbed school, where just 14 months ago male cadets defiantly wore T-shirts saying, "Better Dead Than Co-Ed."

The general has noticed a strange thing on the road to assimilation: The women who were attracted to VMI are very much like the young men who have come since the beginning -- practical, conservative, military-minded, engaged by the school's tradition, mindful of its challenges but not afraid of them either.

"They are kids who have something to do, something to achieve," Bunting said of the incoming women, many of whom he has met. "They recognize, by processes that are both intellectual and chemical, that this is a hard-nosed place. It imposes very tough challenges and very high standards, which are uncompromisable but also honorable, and they think to themselves, `I want to test myself in that crucible.' "

In recent interviews, four of the incoming women said they were not here to reshape VMI and would resent any relaxation of its standards.

"I'm not trying to make history. I'm trying to get an education," said Kimberly Herbert, 18, of Herndon, who eventually wants a commission in the Air Force. "I like the military, the discipline, the time management. VMI will give me the opportunity to develop confidence in myself and have confidence in others because of the honor code."

That is Bunting's message, most bluntly put when he said to women: "You want it? Come get it."

Critics and Skeptics
As school opens, the general is shadowed by critics and skeptics.

Some civil rights advocates and women's groups are concerned about VMI's attempt to admit women with only minimal changes.

"We are going to be watching," said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center. "The worst thing VMI could do is to expect women to be men and not take into account the particular skills and strengths women bring. We have enough serious questions about what VMI has said and not said about its policies that vigilance is important."

VMI waged a bitter fight against the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in the courts. Alumni seriously considered making the school private rather than let women in. And the 9 to 8 vote by the Board of Visitors to finally accept women was seen by some as grudging.

Greenberger said she was particularly concerned about VMI's decision not to change its physical requirements for women, even though the three military academies have done so.

Some alumni, on the other hand, worry that the school will quietly dilute the Rat Line -- the school's systematic humiliation of all freshmen -- to keep its critics and the Justice Department at bay.

"We spent six years and millions of dollars arguing that the first woman to pass under Jackson Arch would fundamentally and irreparably change VMI," said Thomas M. Moncure Jr., a Stafford, Va., resident and a graduate of the Class of '73. "And now we are saying VMI can survive women. What is the truth? Were we lying then, or are we lying now?

"VMI will wither away and become a third-rate choice," predicted Moncure, who resigned from VMI's board in January. "This first group of women is the cream of the crop, but we'll only attract groundbreakers like that for the first year. After that, why would you go there, male or female? VMI will slip into oblivion."

Faith in the Students
Caught between two sets of doubters, who believe he could fail in exactly opposite ways, the tall, patrician-looking Bunting pronounces himself "serene" and says his comfort is the toughness of the women in the incoming class and what he believes will be the willingness of cadets to treat everyone equally awfully.

"It's like the Marines' commercial: a few good men," Bunting said. "Some kids respond to that, and so it is with these young women."

They are, in other words, young people very much in the mold of the young Josiah Bunting, the searching boy who would become a U.S. Marine, VMI graduate, Rhodes Scholar, Vietnam Veteran, novelist, college president, boarding school headmaster and, in his most recent incarnation, VMI superintendent.

"To be transformed by a school and then, 30 years later, to be asked to come back and give back," he said, "I think that has a lot to do with how I feel about VMI."

Kevin Trujillo, 22, the incoming 1st Class president, said of Bunting: "We're very lucky to have him at this time. There's a confidence that with his leadership we can face this calmly and get the job done. He's a very inspiring figure for us."

Bunting was born into a well-to-do family on Philadelphia's Main Line in 1939. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. His mother remarried when he was 7, and they moved to Litchfield, Conn., another bastion of WASP affluence. Sent to the Hill School outside Philadelphia when he was 13, Bunting was expelled after two years and a long string of pranks, such as tossing water balloons out of dorm windows, onto blue-haired ladies. He said he did no better at Salisbury School in Connecticut, where he finally was kicked out after he and a pal took a racing shell out for a midnight row and promptly sank it.

"There were a variety of disciplinary scrapes, all of them terribly 1950s and innocent," he said. "In those days, we did not have drugs and sex and alcohol."

Right Into the Marines
Salisbury, however, allowed him to take his final exams at home. He passed and immediately enlisted in the Marines.

"In those days, in the late 1950s, there was a fair amount of that going on," Bunting recalled. "It was between Korea and Vietnam. A lot of young guys would join the Marines -- a kind of thing you would do if you had something to prove to yourself."

He went through basic training at Parris Island, S.C., served with a Marine infantry regiment in the Mediterranean and got a tattoo, the Marine Corps emblem, on his right forearm.

A thoroughgoing Yankee, Bunting barely had heard of VMI when a fellow Marine suggested he go there when his two-year enlistment was up.

"The only thing I knew about VMI was I was taken to the 1953 Presidential Inaugural Parade, and I can remember my father needling about this one unit that looked so great," Bunting said. "He said they looked better than West Point, and I was enraged by that."

Because of his undistinguished academic record, neither Harvard nor West Point would have looked at him. But VMI forgave him his grades because of his Marine service.

Bunting entered VMI's Rat Line in August 1959. It is the Rat Line and the question of how women will fare in it that has animated much of the debate over coeducation at VMI.

After the freshmen arrive on Monday, their hair will be shorn to the scalp in the first of many rituals that are designed to eliminate distinctions such as race, class, athleticism and, now, gender among freshmen.

What It Means to Be a Rat
As rats, students are subject to six months of abuse -- harangues, push-ups demanded on a whim, pre-dawn exercises called "sweat parties" and in-the-face interrogations about everything from the number of bricks in the parapet to the day's menu. Rats are required to quick-march with their chins pressed down against their collarbones, eyes straight ahead, and they must move and turn in straight lines in the barracks. They are placed on the fourth floor of the barracks so they can be harassed repeatedly as they progress up the stairs to their Spartan rooms.

"I think they will do fine," Bunting said of the women.

Bunting says what he really fears is a "scurrilous episode" -- like at The Citadel -- where one of the women is violently hazed and leaves campus in the spotlight of national exposure.

In the spring, VMI had all faculty, staff and cadets attend what were essentially pep rallies on the arrival of women. There were workshops on sexual harassment and hazing. The school has evaluated all aspects of life on campus, or "the post."

In the barracks, where previously there had been no privacy, rooms have been equipped with window shades. Policies have been developed on dating and wearing jewelry and skirts as part of the VMI uniform. The assimilation process has cost $5.1 million and was underwritten by the State of Virginia.

The school saw no reason to change the Rat Line.

For Bunting, the line's humiliations are less important than its purpose -- the building up of fellowship among Brother Rats, and now Sister Rats, as those who go through it together call one another.

Bunting recalls his own experience with an amused detachment.

"I think as you get older and you look back at the Rat Line, it has an almost `Tom Brown's School Days'/`Catcher in the Rye' quality to it," he said. "I remember it as being tough, but not unpleasant, not without good humor."

Next Stop: Oxford
Bunting survived the Rat Line to become one of the school's most distinguished students. He was regimental commander, captain of the swim team and editor of the school newspaper. In his final year, he was offered a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. VMI had nine or 10 Rhodes Scholars before Bunting but has had only one since, in 1967.

Whatever Anglophile tendencies Bunting might have had, Oxford solidified them. As well as receiving bachelor's and master's degrees there, he developed a passion for the manners and prose of the Victorian era, a nice counterpoint to his ability to curse like a sailor.

"I loved Oxford," he said, winding up for one of his typically weighty sentences. "When I look back on that part of my life, it was a very sunny and felicitous providence that contrived to put me in these places, because Oxford, after four years at VMI, was the most marvelous and marvelously happy complement."

During that time, he met his wife, Diana Cunningham, a Peruvian who was studying in Paris, at the Sorbonne. They have four children, and their third child, Charles, will enter the Rat Line next week.

"I'm not nervous," he said, laughing nervously. "He's a feisty kid."

What Bunting has worried about -- although not as publicly as he once opposed coeducation -- is the academic rigor of the VMI student.

"The academic quality of large numbers of VMI cadets, particularly in fields like history, literature, philosophy, may have dropped off somewhat," Bunting said. "I don't say that happily. If you look at that 30-year blank [for Rhodes scholarships], it's really scary."

VMI now offers admission to about 76 percent of applicants, not a very discriminating rate. Neighboring Washington and Lee University accepts 31 percent; West Point accepts 13 percent.

Which brings Bunting, and VMI, to an interesting possibility: Broadening the applicant pool by admitting women may enable the school to raise academic standards and become more choosy about its students.

Many of the first 32 women had excellent test scores, and 17 of them received full or partial academic scholarships, according to the school. Of the 430 incoming men, 38 received academic scholarships. Bunting insisted that the disproportionate number of scholarships going to women reflects their high school records, not any attempt simply to induce women to come to VMI.

He wants to see another VMI Rhodes Scholar while he is superintendent.

After three years at Oxford, Bunting took up his then-required commission in the Army in 1966 and went to advanced infantry school. After a stint in the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., he went to Vietnam on Nov. 15, 1967. He spent six months with a river force on the Mekong River and six months at headquarters.

After Vietnam, he was an instructor in social sciences at West Point. In a 1972 New York Times interview, he estimated that he had an 80 percent chance of becoming a general.

VMI cadets march. Darrell Ellis/TWP

The book is also a pained tribute to the GIs who fought the war. In his portrayal of the American soldier, one can see the same idealization that marks his vision of the VMI man. In his foreword to "The Lionheads," he remembers seeing a group of bone-tired soldiers near a river fire base during the Tet offensive. "They were utterly American, as American as a tall man with a crew cut appears to a European: casual, loose-jointed, confident," Bunting wrote. "They knew what was coming. Almost half their company had already been killed or wounded, and they were going back for more because they were ordered to.

"The thing that got to you was that last year they had been taking cars apart in Pittsfield or driving tractors outside Bismarck or sinking jump shots in the gym in Cedar Rapids."

Bunting resigned from the Army as a major (his current rank of major general is in the Virginia Militia, courtesy of Gov. George Allen).

He began a peripatetic career as a teacher, college president and headmaster. In the mid-1980s, his name was floated as a candidate for Virginia lieutenant governor. But Bunting is an unlikely politician, and he knows it.

While the president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, he was approached by much larger universities but instead chose to become headmaster of Lawrenceville School near Princeton, N.J. -- exactly the kind of place that once expelled him. Bunting presided over the assimilation of girls at Lawrenceville, which had been an all-male secondary school.

Bunting has continued to write. But his second novel, a comedy of manners about English and American upper-class society, "The Advent of Frederick Giles," was a critical and commercial disaster. The book -- set in an English public school -- is, of course, his favorite work. He has written a third novel, unpublished, the story of a teenage girl whose parents' ambitions for her end up destroying her. The book is based on his experience as headmaster at Lawrenceville.

A Visionary Education
Bunting is working on a new book -- a blueprint for an ideal college. He imagines a billionaire who decides to leave all his money to build a school on the Platte River near Douglas, Wyo.

In a series of letters, the billionaire -- a Bill Gates-type character -- outlines his vision. The school has 1,200 students preparing for "virtuous and disinterested service." It is a five-year school, including one year as a private in either the Marines or Army. There are strict academic and physical requirements. Students study the "great texts" but also immerse themselves in a non-Western language and culture. There is no tenure and 80 percent of the faculty has come to academic life as a late vocation. Students are issued clothes and have no money while on campus. Like Benedictines, they take some of their meals in silence and are read to as they eat. They live one to a room with few comforts.

"Yes," Bunting said with a smile when the inevitable question was asked. "It is coeducational."

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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