A T-shirt on campus compares The Citadel cadets with the spotted owls. It calls them both "Endangered Species." A button worn in the visitors' gallery of the courtroom makes its own point. It reads: "Save the Males."
Once upon a time, The Citadel epitomized every image in its name. The military college in South Carolina was a fortress, a stronghold, a fortified place, a bulwark. Most of the men who marched across its parade grounds never had a military career, but they joined the highest ranks of the state establishment.And now they are feeling threatened.
The Citadel - along with the Virginia Military Institute - is literally the last bastion of the all-male public military colleges. It's a bastion under siege by a young woman named Shannon Faulkner, who wants to join the cadet corps and thinks she has the Constitution on her side.
Exactly 40 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. Now The Citadel is arguing for separate but equal public colleges for men and women.
There is no attempt to deny that The Citadel discriminates against women, or against Faulkner, who was accepted on her record and then denied on account of her sex. Instead The Citadel lawyer challenged the premise of admitting women: "The case is not just about The Citadel or just about Shannon Faulkner or just about higher education. It's about a unisex world view of the law of the land."
He used the word "unisex" - rather than coed or egalitarian - deliberately. The Citadel is hanging its hopes on the belief that we have gone somehow "beyond" the notion that men and women are the same and should have the same education.
Women's colleges now argue that women do much better in all-female institutions. They argue that the cutting edge of feminist change is sharpened in these encouraging environments.
But if colleges like Wellesley and Smith are the female avant-garde, all-male colleges like VMI and The Citadel form the rear-guard. On The Citadel campus, testified one witness and graduate, the word woman is used in a derogatory way "every day, every minute, every hour." And yet the lawyers use the arguments of the Wellesleys and the Smiths to defend The Citadel. They use the arguments of change agents perversely to defend the resistance.
VMI has done that as well. A judge recently allowed the college to remain male as long as the state provided a separate but equal program for women at nearby Mary Baldwin College.
But if The Citadel wants to stay all-male, it can do so without calling upon some educational protection agency. Women's colleges are private. The Citadel can save the males by rejecting public money.
I don't remember anyone rallying to save the last school that segregated blacks in the name of racist diversity. The endangered species here is not men. It's discrimination against women. And I won't be sad to see that wiped out.