SHANNON FAULKNER finally decided her mental health was more important than the dubious honor of being the first woman admitted to an an anachronistic institution whose views on the social order have changed very little since the Civil War.
Good for her.As the father of an alumnus of The Citadel's sister school, Virginia Military Institute, I could have told her what she was trying to accomplish probably wasn't worth it even in the noble context of constitutional rights and equal treatment for women.
Why, with their reputations for almost prisonlike regimentation, would anyone, let alone a woman, want to travel to Charleston, S.C., or Lexington, Va., to spend four years being verbally, if not physically, abused by fellow inmates and treated like juveniles by instructors? It is like spending four years in Marine boot camp.
Founded in the days of state militias, The Citadel and VMI trained young men to become citizen soldiers - able to lead in times of war and to become their states' captains of commerce and industry and politics in periods of peace. It worked, as the war and civilian success records of each school's graduates will attest.
As the decades went by, almost anything that was done once became a tradition whether it was worthy or not, and the traditions turned into rules. It is said that today a VMI cadet can stand perfectly still in the middle of the parade ground and break at least a half-dozen reg-u-la-tions.
From the beginning these schools cherished, worshiped even, their spartan, often brutal approach to learning. To describe the living conditions as primitive would be generous - at least at VMI, where cadets live four or five to a bare-floor, closetless room, on mattresses on iron bedsteads, and must go outside to communal, stallless bathroom facilities that can claim to be modern only because they have running water. The cell block-like barracks date to 1868. The atmosphere is more Alcatraz than college.
This culture is the only unique thing both colleges have to sell. But it is a culture totally unsuited for women, and no constitutional argument can change that. Shannon Faulkner now understands that.
In reality, these places probably have long outlived their usefulness, particularly as tax-supported institutions. Taking them private or closing them might be the only solution to the dilemma.
The former is probably impractical at the moment and the latter politically impossible. The only other relief from government insistence on coeducation would be in a Supreme Court decision endorsing the idea that a separate and similar but more fitting program for women would satisfy the Constitution. VMI already has established such a program and The Citadel is working on it.
Whatever happens, one can hardly blame Shannon Faulkner for finally giving up. The rest of her life is far more important than some 19th-century concept of what makes a man, or, in this case, a woman.