Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 15, 1994 TAG: 9404200002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CLAUDIUS E. WATTS III
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When Shannon Faulkner received a preliminary injunction to attend day classes with The Citadel's Corps of Cadets, she was depicted as a 19-year-old woman fighting for her constitutional rights, while The Citadel was painted as an outdated and chauvinistic Southern school that had to be dragged into the 20th century.
But The Citadel is not fighting to keep women out of the Corps of Cadets because there is a grandiose level of 19th-century machismo to protect. Rather, we are trying to preserve an educational environment that molds young men into grown men of good character, honor and integrity via the fourth-class system. It is part of a single-gender educational system that has proven itself successful throughout history.
The benefits of single-gender education for men are clear: Says Harvard sociologist Dr. David Riesman, not only is single-gender education an optimal means of character development, it removes the distractions of the "mating-dating" game so prevalent in society and enables institutions to focus students on values and academics.
In short, the value of separate education is the fact that it is separate.
In October 1992, a federal appeals court ruled that "single-sex education is pedagogically justifiable." Indeed, a cursory glance at some notable statistics bears that out. For instance, The Citadel has the highest retention rate for minority students of any public college in South Carolina: 67 percent of black students graduate in four years, which is more than 21/2 times the national average.
The Citadel's four-year graduation rate for all students is 70 percent, compared to 48 percent nationally for all other public institutions and 67 percent nationally for private institutions. Moreover, many of the students come from modest backgrounds. Clearly, The Citadel is hardly the bastion of male privilege that the U.S. Justice Department would have us all believe.
While the Justice Department continues to reject the court's ruling affirming the values of single-gender education, others continue to argue that because the federal military academies are coeducational, so should it be at The Citadel. However, it is not The Citadel's primary mission to train officers for the U.S. armed forces; training officers is a byproduct of our ability to educate citizen-soldiers. We commission approximately 30 percent of our graduates, but only 18 percent pursue military careers. At The Citadel, the military model is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Today, there are 84 women's colleges scattered throughout the United States, including two that are public. These colleges defend their programs in that they are necessary to help women overcome intangible barriers in male-dominated professions. This argument has merit; women's colleges produce only 4.5 percent of all female college graduates, but have produced one-fourth of all women board members of Fortune 500 companies and one-half of the women in Congress. The educational benefits of men's colleges are equally clear; and to allow women alone to benefit from single-sex education seems to perpetuate the very stereotypes that women - including Faulkner - are trying to correct.
If young women want and need to study and learn in single-gender schools, why is it automatically wrong for young men to want and need the same? Where is the fairness in this assumption?
"At what point does the insistence that one individual not be deprived of choice spill over into depriving countless individuals of choice?" asks Emory University's Elizabeth Fox Genovese in a recent article published in The New Republic.
Yet, so it is at The Citadel. While one student maintains that she is protecting her freedom to associate, we mustn't forget that The Citadel's cadets also have a freedom: the freedom not to associate. And while we have read about one female's rights, what hasn't been addressed are the rights of 1,900 cadets who chose The Citadel - and the accompanying discipline and drill - because it offered them the single-gender educational experience they always wanted. Why do one student's rights supersede all theirs?
One might be easily tempted to argue on the grounds that Faulkner is a taxpayer and The Citadel is a tax-supported institution. If the taxpayer argument holds, the next step, then, is to forbid all public support for institutions that enroll students of only one gender. A draconian measure such as this would surely mean the end of public and private single-gender colleges. Most private colleges - Columbia and Converse colleges included - could not survive without federal financial aid, tax exemptions and state tax support in the form of tuition grants. In fact, nearly 900 of Columbia's and Converse's female students receive state-funded tuition grants, a student population that is almost half the size of the Corps of Cadets. In essence, South Carolina's two private women's colleges may stand or fall with The Citadel.
Carried to its logical conclusion, then, the effort to coeducate The Citadel might mean the end of all single-gender education - for women as well as men, in private as well as public schools.
By imposing conformity at The Citadel, we stand to lose educational diversity. By enforcing one person's freedom, we are depriving freedom from thousands of others. And by withdrawing tax support of single-gender institutions - whether public or private - we stand to lose an integral component of this country's higher-education fabric.
Claudius E. Watts III, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general, is president of The Citadel in South Carolina.
by CNB