Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408090012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOSIAH BUNTING III
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He is attracted especially to the school's economics curriculum. He relishes the chance to study with a new professor of whom he has heard much.
His mother reminds him the college is all-female and private. But he knows that the college is in receipt of very substantial federal and state monies, in various forms and ways, including tuition and scholarship support.
As an American and a Massachusetts taxpayer, he sees the obvious path before him, and it is both wide and clear. He sues for admission. His 14th Amendment (equal protection) rights are, in his view, being completely trashed by the college's admissions policy. In any case, what difference will it make to Wellesley to have him, a quiet young man, sitting in the back of lecture halls making notes, using the library, joining in a poetry seminar or having a few conversations with the new economics professor?
The case immediately becomes celebrated, the way such things do in our country. Two years later, it makes its way, a trail of bitter controversy and rancor behind it, to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, Justice Clarence Thomas, strict constructionist and rigorous follower of precedent, writes the majority opinion, finding for the plaintiff. Mr. Justice Thomas cites Faulkner vs. Jones, U.S. Supreme Court, 1996 - in which The Citadel was required to admit women, being in receipt of state and federal monies.
Within three months, 700 applications are received at Wellesley from young men. The president of the college has appointed a committee of faculty, trustees, students and alumni to determine the "appropriate gender mix" for the college, and "the most efficacious means by which young men can become fully fledged members of the undergraduate student body."
On the day this committee is appointed, an article at the bottom of the front page of The New York Times informs readers that the boards of trustees of, respectively, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Converse, Hollins, Mills, Mount Holyoke and Sweet Briar colleges are meeting in retreats to consider how to assure the smoothest integration of males into their student bodies. And a letter to the Boston Globe, in response to an announcement that Mount Holyoke is admitting boys, contains the following piteous sentences, obviously written by an alumna: "They are taking one of the two or three greatest, most singular women's colleges in the world, and making it into a mediocre coed place. And can you imagine the boys who are going to enroll?"
By the end of 1999, both Wabash College in Indiana and Hampden-Sydney in Virginia have announced their compliance with the court's decisions, as has Virginia Military Institute. These three craggy old places - like The Citadel, more than a century of educating men, and men only, behind them - are to become coeducational with the coming of the new millennium.
Interestingly, VMI's applicant pool for the coming year comprises 1,320 males and but nine women. Interestingly because the leading expert witnesses representing the plaintiff in The Citadel case, back in 1994, swore that "demand always follows opportunity. If you make The Citadel coed, you'll be amazed at how many young women will apply there, and to VMI too."
Attendance at The Citadel no longer leads reliably to a commission in the U.S. armed forces, which have shrunk 35 percent since 1994. So the young women applying for admission are doing so only because they want to live in barracks and undergo the same rigorous, Spartan, disciplined life that has always been provided to male cadets, and because, one of them admits, "I want to tap into that old-boy network that more or less runs the business and politics and law of the Palmetto State."
Both The Citadel and VMI are spending substantial sums to implement the necessary changes, to accommodate "full" coeducation. Active recruitment of new, progressive-minded trustees is under way - an enthusiastic endorsement of the new admissions policy being the fundamental criterion for appointment to these coveted posts.
And in an odd and amusing feature of the national collegiate movement to full coeducationalization, everywhere, including private secondary schools for adolescent girls and boys, both The Citadel and Wellesley report "crossing" several applications. That is, each school notes that a few of its applicants are also candidates for admission to the other. Asked for a comment, the Wellesley president talks about the possibility of establishing Naval ROTC on campus, with Marine option.
The foregoing is no Orwellian dream. It is the logical terminus of the courts' decisions, should they make them, in favor of the plaintiff, Shannon Faulkner, in the current, celebrated Citadel case.
No doubt two years will lapse before all appeals have been heard, all the way up the line, and there is reason to hope that the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond will reverse any lower-court judgment that Faulkner be admitted to full cadetship at The Citadel - the appeals court having concluded, in the VMI case, that VMI's "male-only policy is fully justified by a generally accepted benefit of single-sex education."
The Citadel's character - its ethos - is distinctive. At the very core of that character is its identity as a military college for young men. It is not a federal academy dedicated to the preparation of career military officers. It is, moreover, one of only four residential colleges for men in our country. (There are 84 women's colleges.)
To eliminate The Citadel as one of those four, by insisting that it admit women to the Corps of Cadets, would be to trample upon more than 150 years' proved effectiveness in education and training in a singular context; it would be to take a truly giant step toward the ending of that diversity that has always been a hallmark of higher education in our country.
One may indeed argue plausibly that Faulkner is being denied an opportunity; but her admission, and the enrollment of women in the South Carolina Corps of Cadets, will be to deny an opportunity - for education in a men's college - to 1,900 young men.
From time to time, issues and controversies, in themselves of local or regional compass, force judgments and decisions whose implications are monumental. Here is one of them.
There is a native American conservatism - productive, proud, honorable - which recognizes that no human institution serves a broad social purpose, surviving successfully for many generations in that service, unless its character is of permanent value. Such institutions are classics - as surely as great symphonies and great novels are classics - because they speak to continuing needs in successive generations of human history.
We tamper with them at incalculable risk; and once we alter them in radical ways, we cannot coax them back to their former strengths. No doubt coeducation is right for many, indeed for most American colleges and schools. But it is surely wrong for this magnificent old military college in Charleston, S.C. It is worse than wrong, it is asinine.
As asinine as the following sports-news headline, Oct. 11, 2003: "Wellesley rips Mount Holyoke, 51-22; Sanders runs for 215 yards; Peach, Citrus Bowl officials in attendance..."
Josiah Bunting III, former president of all-male Hampden-Sydney College, is headmaster of The Lawrenceville School, a coeducational boarding school in Lawrenceville, N.J.
by CNB