Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 29, 1994 TAG: 9406010045
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SARA L. MANDELBAUM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
VMI has cooked up an elaborate "separate but equal" plan to endow nearby Mary Baldwin College with $6.9 million to create a kind of VMI Lite for women. The state of South Carolina proposed its so-called remedial "plan" on April Fool's Day, committing itself to nothing but setting forth a variety of supposed alternatives to admitting women to The Citadel.
Last spring, The Citadel scrapped its day classes for veterans altogether, callously cutting loose 78 male veterans in order to avoid admitting three women veterans. In the meantime, 19-year-old Shannon Faulkner and the three veterans - Patricia Johnson, Elizabeth Lacey and Angela Chapman - continue to fight for their right to attend The Citadel.
So what is all the fuss about? And who are these women who pose such a threat to The Citadel as we know it?
Faulkner is a first-rate student and varsity athlete who has the integrity to pursue to the end her dream to become a part of The Citadel cadet corps. All three female veterans served honorably in the U.S. Navy. Johnson holds a variety of medals, including a National Defense Medal earned during Desert Storm. Chapman was awarded two Achievement Medals, a Sea Ribbon and a Battle Efficiency Ribbon. Lacey excelled in the Navy as a mechanical calibrator of naval instruments. What they want is simple: access to public education in a rigorous military environment, close to home, along with all the special benefits of access to the ultimate old-boy network.
The ideology driving the opposition may be less apparent at first glance. But Josiah Bunting III, headmaster of the Lawrenceville School, a coeducational boarding school in Lawrenceville, N.J., shed some light on this question in a moment of candor, or, perhaps, carelessness. He testified in a pretrial deposition that the entry of women to The Citadel's classrooms would be akin to introducing "a toxic kind of virus" to the school.
It's an ancient idea: women as tainted, polluted, corrupting, somehow diseased - Simone de Beauvoir's "Other." The idea was echoed by a star graduate of The Citadel, who testified that the very word "woman" (along with "skirt" and other more vulgar terms) is one of the insults most frequently hurled at cadets by those superior to them in class or rank, as in, "Are you a women? Are you having your period? ... Why don't we get a skirt for you?"
Renowned sociologist David Riesman, who is a witness for both VMI and The Citadel, introduced a paternalistic theme to the mix. According to Riesman, the plaintiffs are, quite simply, delusional: "It's only an imaginary idea," he said, "because were they to enter the institution, what attracted them to it would vanish by their very presence."
Echoing the racial segregationists of a generation ago, Riesman suggests that women will, by their mere presence, destroy the very opportunities they seek. This logic casts women as poisonous even to themselves.
The notion that women will somehow contaminate The Citadel figures implicitly throughout The Citadel's defense. For example, The Citadel argues that having women, innate temptresses that they are, in the classroom will sexually distract the cadets from their studies. Reality, however, undermines this claim. Women are omnipresent on The Citadel's campus - as office workers, teachers, administrators, janitors and visiting students from nearby schools - except as equals in the classroom. And, hypocritically, The Citadel ensures that cadets have access to women by allowing them to cross-register at nearby coed colleges, while at the same time denying women access to a publicly financed educational program.
The Citadel argues that men and women are so fundamentally different, physically, intellectually and morally, that these "differences" justify a state-supported males-only school.
One witness, a tenured professor of literature at The Citadel, was asked in a deposition, "How are men and women not equal?" He replied, "Well, men have external genitals and women have internal genitals." (He was, however, unable to explain the precise relationship between anatomy and equal access to public education.)
The significance of these "differences," especially their relation to The Citadel's educational method, has been grossly overstated. In fact, the similarities between men and women often far exceed the differences - particularly with respect to cognitive and intellectual functioning. We are, after all, members of the same species.
The toxic virus threatening The Citadel and VMI is the cult of hypermasculinity and the prejudice it breeds. Carol Gilligan, author of "In a Different Voice," the pathbreaking study of moral development, explains in her affidavit on behalf of the women that The Citadel's false male-female dichotomy and sex-based stereotypes produce a "psychologically noxious" environment in that they teach a distorted view of human psychology, deny the complexity of human experience and subordinate "essential human qualities."
Far from resembling some kind of toxic germ, the women who seek admission to The Citadel epitomize those very qualities that the school can only hope its students develop by the time they graduate - leadership, loyalty to one's beliefs, persistence, honor and dignity.
Such women are hardly "a toxic kind of virus." Instead, in their quest for equality and an end to unconstitutional gender segregation, they are surely the vaccine that can inoculate The Citadel and VMI from the culturally toxic threat of rank prejudice.
Sara L. Mandelbaum is acting director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is co-counsel to plaintiffs at The Citadel and a friend of the court in the VMI litigation.
by CNB