The nation's chief justice cleared the way for Shannon Faulkner to report to the Citadel this morning as the first female cadet in the school's 152-year history.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Friday rejected an emergency request from the state-run military school to keep her out.The Citadel made a last-ditch appeal to Justice Antonin Scalia, but he rejected the request without comment late Friday. Scalia could have granted the request or referred the matter to the full court.
"I am going to be in the corps, and I will graduate as a member of the corps, and other women will follow me," Faulkner said.
The 20-year-old junior, flanked by her lawyers and parents, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne in a garden in Charleston and filled their glasses. She had ice water.
Faulkner was to report to campus this morning with about 600 freshmen. U.S. District Judge C. Weston Houck has ordered that federal marshals monitor her entry into the corps.
"I am confident I will be able to meet every standard the Citadel has in place on campus," she said. "I'm actually going to try to be the best cadet I can possibly be. And I'm not going to be on campus for anyone else but me."
Rehnquist, who studied the case from his vacation home in Vermont, gave no written reason for his decision.
"We intend to comply fully with the orders of the courts," said Citadel President Claudius E. Watts III.
"The issue concerning single-gender education is a legal controversy about which there are dif-fering views and attitudes. It is not a fight between the Citadel and Shannon Faulkner," Watts said.
The Charleston school was ordered by a federal appeals court in April to admit Faulkner as a cadet if the state did not establish a comparable military program for women at some other school.
The state is developing a $10 million women's leadership program at private Converse College, but the plan is still in preliminary stages and has not been approved by the courts.
The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute are the nation's only all-male, state-supported military colleges.
The Citadel had asked Rehnquist, who handles emergency matters from South Carolina for the high court, to delay Faulkner's entrance as a cadet until the full court reviews the case.
"If there is any room at all under the Constitution for public single-sex education, then surely The Citadel's Corps of Cadets qualifies," the school's lawyers argued.
Faulkner was accepted by the Citadel in 1993 after references to her gender were deleted from her high school transcript. The school later withdrew its offer of admission, and she sued, claiming the all-male program is unconstitutional.
She has attended classes at the 2,000-student college since January 1994 under an order from U.S. District Judge C. Weston Houck, but she has not been allowed to take military training or wear a uniform.
Even as Rehnquist handed down his order, both sides argued in a Charleston federal courtroom over how Faulkner's band audition would be handled thismorning.
Faulkner failed one audition, but Houck had ordered that she be given another chance with the freshmen who report today.