580
Scalia, J., dissenting
charge, the Court would have to impute that base motive to VMI's Mission Study Committee, which conducted a 3-year study from 1983 to 1986 and recommended to VMI's Board of Visitors that the school remain all male. The committee, a majority of whose members consisted of non-VMI graduates, "read materials on education and on women in the military," "made site visits to single-sex and newly coeducational institutions" including West Point and the Naval Academy, and "considered the reasons that other institutions had changed from single-sex to coeducational status"; its work was praised as "thorough" in the accreditation review of VMI conducted by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. See 766 F. Supp., at 1413, 1428; see also id., at 1427-1430 (detailed findings of fact concerning the Mission Study Committee). The Court states that "[w]hatever internal purpose the Mission Study Committee served— and however well meaning the framers of the report—we can hardly extract from that effort any commonwealth policy evenhandedly to advance diverse educational options." Ante, at 539. But whether it is part of the evidence to prove that diversity was the Commonwealth's objective (its short report said nothing on that particular subject) is quite separate from whether it is part of the evidence to prove that antifeminism was not. The relevance of the Mission Study Committee is that its very creation, its sober 3-year study, and the analysis it produced utterly refute the claim that VMI has elected to maintain its all-male student-body composition for some misogynistic reason.
The Court also supports its analysis of Virginia's "actual state purposes" in maintaining VMI's student body as all male by stating that there is no explicit statement in the record " 'in which the Commonwealth has expressed itself' " concerning those purposes. Ante, at 535, 539 (quoting 976 F. 2d 890, 899 (CA4 1992)); see also ante, at 525. That is wrong on numerous grounds. First and foremost, in its implication that such an explicit statement of "actual purposes"
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