Lawyer Brands The Citadel Bastion of Discrimination : Trial: Woman seeking admission to all-male cadet corps alleges constitutional violations. Judge assails school for filing mistrial motion.

Lawyers for a woman fighting to gain admittance to The Citadel, South Carolina’s all-male military academy, on Thursday called the school a remnant of a past era of rampant discrimination and asked a judge to order her immediate admission.

“Men in South Carolina have choices, and women do not,” said attorney Val Vojdik during closing arguments in the trial.

Nineteen-year-old Shannon Faulkner is suing the 152-year-old state-supported college for admittance to its all-male cadet corps. She filed the lawsuit last year after the school rejected her because of her gender.

Attorneys for The Citadel Thursday earlier asked for a mistrial, arguing that U.S. District Judge C. Weston Houck may have already made up his mind on the case. Houck denied the motion Thursday and said he was considering citing the school for filing the motion for publicity purposes.

Houck said he will issue a ruling on Faulkner’s case in July.

Calling The Citadel’s refusal to admit women a clear violation of the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees, Vojdik said the school would rather “dig at the bottom of the barrel for another man to fit a bed” than admit a qualified woman.

She said the school has had to lower standards and admit men from out-of-state to keep its enrollment up, a contention the school has denied.

Lawyers for The Citadel acknowledged that the state offers unequal educational opportunities. They argued, however, that this did not violate the Constitution because financial--not gender--factors was the reason why South Carolina has no all-female public college. The state’s one all-female public college became co-educational 20 years ago because of declining enrollments, attorney Dawes Cooke said.

As for The Citadel’s failure to admit women, he said that the court should defer to the state’s “longstanding policy of supporting single-gender education.”

“The Citadel is committed to single-gender education,” Cooke said, adding that if it loses the lawsuit it would choose to set up a separate all-female program rather than admit Faulkner to the cadet corps.

He asked Houck to allow the school sufficient time to set up such a program rather than require it to admit Faulkner this fall.

Houck earlier had told school officials to make contingency plans for admitting Faulkner this fall in case he ruled in her favor. He scolded them last month for dragging their feet and excoriated them Thursday for filing the mistrial motion, partly in response to the order.

The motion said the contingency plan order suggested Houck may have already made up his mind against them. Citadel’s attorneys also argued that they had been held to stricter rules than the plaintiffs.

Calling the motion “totally frivolous,” Houck said, “I haven’t even begun the process of deciding this case, much less reached a decision.”

Faulkner, a high school honors student, said she deleted gender references from her application to The Citadel and gained admission. Once the school discovered who she was, she was rejected. She has been allowed to take day classes at the school pending the outcome of the trial, but she cannot take part in military training, wear a uniform or live on campus.

Virginia Military Institute, the nation’s only other all-male, state-supported military college, is creating an off-campus parallel program for women after a court ordered it either to admit women, become private or develop a parallel program for women.

Presidents of South Carolina’s two women’s private colleges say they aren’t interested in developing a military program on their campuses, and Citadel officials say they doubt they can raise the money necessary to sever its ties to the state.

One of the options South Carolina is considering, if the judge rules against the state, is to send women who want a military education to attend school in another state. But Vojdik said that should be unacceptable.

Citing the school’s prestige, its influential alumni network, low student-teacher ratio and low tuition, she said: “The Citadel is rich in opportunities that should be shared with women in the state.”