Citadel, Forward March
Shannon Faulkner is struggling through her first week at the Citadel, and many Americans seem to be struggling along with her. Reporters were at the South Carolina military college on Monday, the first day of training for new cadets. The 20-year-old ended the day in the infirmary, one of five cadets made ill by 100-degree heat during a routine of marching, shouting and saluting, part of what the school calls training by stress and what cadets call “hell week.”
Why was Faulkner’s long legal fight for admission news and why do we care whether she can now survive the grueling, often humiliating training regime of the previously all-male fortress? Why did so many wince or snicker on hearing comments about her being unable to take the heat?
Nineteen years ago West Point and Annapolis first accepted women as cadets; 29 years ago the Citadel first accepted African Americans. Now--amid the noisy, angry effort to discard affirmative action programs in education and employment in favor of a so-called return to merit--Faulkner’s struggle compels because she is right.
The Citadel receives 28% of its funds from the State of South Carolina; taxpayers like Faulkner and her parents subsidize this school. Yet for all of its 152-year history, the institution has been off-limits to half of the state’s population. Faulkner is right to argue that is not fair, and the federal courts have supported her.
“Why in the world does Shannon Faulkner want to attend the Citadel?” many ask. She has answers, of course: a good education, the discipline of military training in a college near her home and access to the network of Citadel graduates. But she need not justify herself. Certainly she is qualified on the basis of academic achievement; her high school grade point average was 3.7, compared to a Citadel freshman average of 2.5. For its part, the Citadel has failed utterly in its laborious effort to justify a male-only tradition, one that has been characterized by hazings and violence.
Whether Faulkner will make it is an open question. But whether the Citadel will remain cocooned in some long ago time, when men were men and women were something else again, is not. Shannon Faulkner may be the first, but she won’t be the last.