
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 22, 1995                   TAG: 9508220089
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CITADEL

SHANNON Faulkner's failure to survive hell week at the Citadel is sure to give aid and comfort to the many - men and women - who favor keeping the taxpayer-supported school a bastion of male bonding. She lost her battle, as some fellow male knobs do. But that is not the war.

It is still wrong for a public college to deny, solely on the basis of gender, half the public an opportunity to receive an education there.

As its proud supporters remind prospective male cadets, the education offered there is unique. The rigidly structured, highly disciplined, physically difficult life of cadets at the Citadel, much as at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, fosters a solidarity among graduates that forges lifelong friendships - and connections. Those who make it through see themselves as belonging to a certain elite for life.

Not everyone makes it. An elite is not elite if just anyone can belong. And definitely unwelcome in this elite is any woman.

Faulkner took on the unenviable role of crusader to bring down the gender barrier at the Citadel. The principle was won, at least in terms of the latest legal ruling. The courts rightly ordered Faulkner's admission into the corps of cadets. But the person lost. Faulkner didn't make it through the grueling hell-week initiation.

It's regrettable she wasn't tough enough. She didn't look particularly fit, but she says she was overwhelmed psychologically rather than physically. Her harshest critics would have to concede that by the time she joined the corps, she already had been through not one week but years of hell on her lonely journey.

Faulkner has been vilified, her family's home vandalized, her car egged - and through all of the name-calling and public denunciations, she has not been able to turn for strength to a class of fellow cadets going through the same thing. She faced tougher mental tests than her male counterparts did.

Whether Faulkner could have survived the Citadel's rigorous demands had she been allowed to enroll without the protracted legal battle can never be known. But anyone who argues that no female can make it should be asked to explain how women have distinguished themselves at the nation's top military academies.

Faulkner has, in any case, won the right for other young women to try if they choose. Not all pioneers reach their destination. But, given the way other institutions throughout society are evolving, it isn't absurd to hope that women at the Citadel and VMI one day may be spared the kind of trials Faulkner endured.

by CNB