Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 21, 1995 TAG: 9509210015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARIANNE MEANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Shannon Faulkner has given up, but the cause of equal rights she symbolized is still very much with us.
The high bench will be asked to decide the constitutionality of the small programs created at nearby private women's schools by the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel in South Carolina as an alternative to integrating their own cadet ranks.
Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that supposedly separate but equal public schools segregating the races were in fact unequal and unconstitutional. Now the court is expected to decide whether separate and unabashedly unequal publicly funded military schools that segregate the sexes are unconstitutional as well.
In Virginia, a lower federal court ruled that the benefits to men of VMI's single-sex education are sufficient to justify keeping women outside the gates in less comprehensive military programs.
In South Carolina, however, a court held that the Citadel had to admit Shannon Faulkner because it did not offer similar educational opportunities for women. After the ruling, the Citadel hastily created a small substitute program patterned after that at VMI. A judge is due to rule in November whether the new arrangement is acceptable.
The Supreme Court is likely to review the two cases this term, settling this fundamental question of equal rights once and for all.
Shannon Faulkner's ill-fated attempt to become a Citadel cadet is mercifully over. After it became clear she wasn't a well-conditioned superwoman after all, male cadets rejoiced in her misery and traditionalists everywhere crowed that women's rights had suffered a setback.
But the VMI-Citadel issue was never about Faulkner or any other individual. Already other women have stepped forward to apply.
Nor was it about the educational value of one-sex schools, which has been debated forever and probably always will be. Other one-sex schools, in any case, are self-supporting, privately funded institutions.
Nor was it about female fitness for the military life. While Faulkner was flunking out at the Citadel, hundreds of female pledges at West Point, Colorado Springs and Annapolis were successfully beginning the rigorous training that would turn them into proper Army, Navy and Air Force cadets. This spring a woman was the highest-ranked West Point graduate in a class of 988 cadets.
No, the fuss is really about money and power.
Both VMI and the Citadel depend heavily on funds from taxpayers. Both schools regularly get annual grants of several million dollars from state coffers filled by taxes paid by both sexes.
What is going on here is illegal sex discrimination, taxing women for educational services provided only to males. Whatever happened to the principle that public education is supposed to be equally available to all?
A few years ago, the Supreme Court held that only compelling ``educational purposes'' could justify discrimination by gender in a state-supported school. It ordered a females-only Mississippi nursing college to admit men.
VMI and the Citadel contend their compelling purpose is to maintain the traditional masculine character that enables them to enforce discipline and develop fitness to command. This is sexist rubbish. The major service academies have integrated peacefully without undue damage to their training mission or to national security.
In any case, neither VMI nor the Citadel are mere military-preparedness machines. Only a minority of alums go into the armed services; most take up civilian business careers, where they must exercise their fitness to command in a two-sex society.
The familiar whine about male bonding has been used to bar women from every traditional male domain from luncheon clubs to corporate boardrooms. It's as phony now as it has always been.
VMI has been allowed to remain closed to women because the judge there said it provides a ``separate but substantially comparable'' military education for women 35 miles away at the all-female Mary Baldwin College. Comparable, my eye.
The 45 women are getting neither the traditional VMI teaching nor its physical training and are denied the advantages of the VMI alumni network. The Citadel's hastily cobbled-together program at Converse College, 220 miles away from Charleston in Spartanburg, has enrolled 22 female students. It is also a pale imitation of the real thing. It does not even offer courses at the Citadel. The women will take ``leadership'' courses and get physical training.
The Supreme Court has a job to do here, and it has nothing to do with Shannon Faulkner.
Marianne Means is a Hearst Newspapers columnist.
- New York Times News Service
by CNB