(FORTUNE Magazine) – Since we last wrote about the VMI case a couple of fortnights ago, two things have happened. The astounding thing was Federal District Judge Jackson L. Kiser's willingness to buck the zeitgeist, go against the politically correct flow, and defy the New York Times by ruling in favor of the Virginia Military Institute, which is now free to go right on excluding women. As previously posited in this space, the VMI case has implications for single-sex women's colleges. They too were threatened by the antidiscrimination logic that sought to coeducationalize VMI. Now they are free to go right on excluding men -- assuming Kiser's ruling is not appealed and reversed. The unastounding thing was the reaction of the women's movement to this good ( news for women's colleges. ''It's an insult to women,'' said Isabelle Katz Pinzler of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. ''It's an outrage,'' said Ellen Vargyas of the National Women's Law Center. It ''proves again how much we need the Equal Rights Amendment for protection,'' said Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women. Predictable, eh? And yet weird. Is the women's movement really indifferent to the fate of women's colleges? Might the colleges be an affront to the movement's unshakable belief that the sexes are, except for reproductive differences, the same? Is that why movement stalwart Pinzler told Keeping Up, ''I understand the arguments in favor of single-sex colleges for women, but they should be overruled by policy calling for sex equality in education''? Women's colleges are plainly important to many female students. Figures appended to Judge Kiser's ruling refer to 64,000 women (and 11,400 men) in single-sex colleges. Expert witnesses testified at the trial that students in women's colleges are more likely than other women to graduate and go on to positions of leadership. At coeducational colleges, classrooms are endlessly dominated by men, mainly because men are more competitive than women. Oh, you didn't know that? You should read The Secret of the Miracle Economy, a slender volume recently produced by British psychologist Richard Lynn. Reporting on male-female differences as measured on the Spence and Helmreich Competitiveness Scale, Lynn notes a consistently greater drive by men than women ''to win against others, and obtain some form of dominance over them through winning.'' In 20 different countries, including the U.S. and miraculous Japan, men are significantly more competitive than women. The only country wherein the women were significantly more competitive was Iraq. You probably didn't know that either. Some of the women's-movement activists claim that Judge Kiser's decision is irrelevant to women's colleges. They say that women's colleges are virtually all private (true) and therefore beyond the reach of cases like the one brought by the Department of Justice against VMI (doubtful). DOJ had argued that as a government-supported institution, VMI was violating the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of ''equal protection'' by excluding women. But the public-private distinction is much less neat than it sounds. The Supreme Court has firmly held that, in sex-discrimination suits brought under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, private colleges will be considered publicly supported if any of their students receive federal financial aid -- as some students do at just about all colleges. It would seem odd for the courts to abandon this reasoning when lawsuits against private colleges rest on constitutional grounds. To really get off the hook, the women's colleges need broad judicial support for Judge Kiser's reasoning: that single-sex colleges can offer something different (and that educational diversity is a worthwhile public objective). Some of the women's colleges clearly understand this. The acting president of Smith told Keeping Up that the VMI decision did seem to bolster the case for single-sex institutions. But heads of women's colleges also have to cope with feminist ideologues, and unlike Kiser, not many are ready yet to go against the flow.