Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 23, 1994 TAG: 9405230128
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY JORDAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: CHARLESTON, S.C. LENGTH: Long
She expected that much, when she yanked the tail of the biggest tiger in South Carolina. What she didn't expect when she enrolled at the Citadel military college in Charleston was the level of vitriol from other women.
``The people that have the most trouble with me are the mothers of cadets, the wives of alumni and girlfriends of cadets,'' she says while walking across the campus, where she is the first woman to attend day classes. ``But I can't figure why they call me a lesbian. It doesn't make sense. Why would I want to go to school with 1,800 guys?''
Even though Faulkner is wearing dark sunglasses, two young women from town recognize her. Almost everyone here does. Instantly, the two clutch their throats and pretend to puke. ``What ladies!'' Faulkner deadpans in her soft Southern accent.
She continues walking, as if the women had simply said hello, and laughs:
``Welcome to a typical day in the life of Shannon Faulkner.''
Strangers have told her she looks like a cow and that her clothes are ``ugly, ugly, ugly.'' Her parents' home has been vandalized; her lawyer has become a local pariah. She is as welcome here as a return visit from Gen. Sherman's troops. But she is enduring for one simple prize.
``I want to wear the ring.''
The Citadel ring is a passport into a powerful network difficult to understand outside of the state. It means friends for life, connections in high places, the lifelong satisfaction of surviving a four-year boot camp. The Citadel is not like any other college in America. Its main buildings are solid white and shaped like Moorish castles. The campus looks like a Walt Disney movie set for ``Ivanhoe.''
This is Charleston, a place where adults tell children the Ashley and Cooper rivers here don't flow into the Atlantic Ocean, they form it. A place where the Ivy League is regarded as a Northern nuisance and the Citadel is simply the best.
Faulkner decided to join the fraternity of Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley, U.S. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, and a long list of South Carolina business and political elite while sitting in class at Wren High. Her teacher in the rural Powdersville, S.C., public school told her that despite her A's, she could not go to the Citadel because she wasn't a man. That clinched it.
If her name had been Betty or Sue, she probably wouldn't have gotten in. She asked her guidance counselor to white-out all references to her gender on her application and the college accepted her, thinking Shannon was a man's name. It rescinded the offer when officials learned she was a woman. A legal battle was on. The trial began last week.
Unflattering portrait
Over and over she has been asked the same questions: Why would you want to go to this college where there are more rules and push-ups than some prisons? Why pick a school with a history of racism and extreme hazing? ``I just wanted to go to the best school that I could,'' she says.
``I don't think it's fair that taxpayers pay for a school that women can't go to,'' she says.
Other answers stream out: Her older brother is in the Navy. She thought military training would do her good. She liked that the Citadel has no requirement for active military service. And she had just read Pat Conroy's best-selling novel based on the college, ``The Lords of Discipline.''
Even though Conroy's portrait is not flattering, Faulkner says the college intrigued her. Conroy, a Citadel graduate, has been encouraging her, telephoning every so often. ``He said he would be honored to be with me the first night I wear the ring.''
Faulkner is an unlikely crusader. She's the girl who lived next door, the female jock who kept basketball stats for the boys team, who could spot a foul faster than the referee.
More serious than many 19-year-olds, she's self-assured, the kind of student who ran the high school paper or student government. She hopes to be a teacher, like her mother. Her conversation is littered with legal jargon from endless hours spent with her team of lawyers.
She doesn't suffer from teen-age timidity: She sternly refuses reporters' requests to interview her friends, and easily turned down ``Larry King Live'' and the ``Today'' show when they insisted on filming her on campus. ``I am just not going to do that. It would be a circus.''
As she puts on neon pink and black sunglasses, slips her bare feet into brown moccasins, and lets her ponytail fly in the wind, Faulkner loses the heavy talk and turns to the topic of men. She mentions a boyfriend back at the University of South Carolina in Spartanburg - he wants to be a cop.
``Never, never,'' she says, would she date a Citadel man. ``But of course some of the guys are cute. I am not dead, am I?''
Faulkner became a national celebrity in January - one prime-time show even likened her to Scarlett O'Hara, complete with footage from ``Gone With the Wind'' - when her case reached the Supreme Court.
The court agreed she should be admitted to the Citadel, all-male since before the Civil War, pending the outcome of her lawsuit challenging the school's admission policy. The Justice Department has joined her lawsuit and Attorney General Janet Reno has called to lend support.
The court ruling admitted Faulkner to class, but not to the Corps of Cadets. That means she isn't allowed to wear a uniform, or join the military drills, or participate in any activity outside of class. She can't even eat with the other students, who march together to mess at exactly 12:05. A win at trial would make Faulkner one of them, a cadet in blue-gray uniform, seated in the grand dining hall under 15 giant American flags.
In a lot of ways Faulkner is famous by a fluke. She was accepted by mistake at a college ripe for a lawsuit. She was a ``dream plaintiff,'' with qualifications no one could dispute, says attorney Robert Black. Eager attorneys from outside the state offered much needed help; the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling and the American Civil Liberties Union have been working on the case, with attorneys present at every hearing.
Though she never anticipated all the publicity, she doesn't seem to mind it, except when reporters call just before exams. Even if Faulkner had wanted to, suddenly it was hard to turn back. ``I don't feel like I have to stay,'' she says. ``But I am in this until I graduate.''
There are those who help her. Some black students, who account for only 6 percent of the class, have been friendly. (One, whose supportive comments were published in The Washington Post on her first day of class, junior cadet Von Mickle, has been ridiculed for breaking from the brotherhood.)
A few instructors have been kind too. One political science professor, Gardel Feurtado, doesn't take the official hard line. ``Marginal stuff,'' such as some athletic requirements, might have to be adjusted, he says. ``What is good about the Citadel would not be ruined by women.''
$1 million fight
If the Citadel were private, Faulkner would have no case. But 30 percent of the Citadel's $40 million annual budget comes from the state, and she is suing on the argument that public schools cannot discriminate.
Citadel officials argue that reams of studies show single-gender education programs offer a great benefit to many students. They say their admissions policy and rigorous program is one that should not only be kept alive, but replicated. By some estimates, the college will spend more than $1 million on its legal fight to keep women out, a fight that includes former Attorney General Griffin Bell arguing on the college's behalf.
In the 1970s, the federal military academies like West Point began admitting women as the armed forces turned coed. The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., are the only two state-supported, all-male military colleges in the country. VMI is also being sued, and a federal judge last month approved a plan that would settle the suit by setting up a similar program for girls at nearby Mary Baldwin College. The Justice Department is expected to appeal and continue to fight for women's inclusion at VMI.
Financial effects
Upon arrival, all freshmen must perform a minimum of 42 push-ups and 52 sit-ups, and run 2 miles in less than 15 minutes and 54 seconds. No student may marry. A booklet of instructions governs how freshmen walk and talk.
The guide for conduct of freshman, known as ``knobs,'' reminds them they are no longer ``civilians,'' and therefore, ``certain answers such as ``yeah' and ``OK' will no longer be part of your vocabulary. The three ``knob' answers are: ``Sir, yes, sir,' ``Sir, no, sir,' ``Sir, no excuse, sir.' ''
``Every luxury is taken away, even down to walking in a straight line,'' says senior Christopher Brown. The discipline, he insists, is good for the mind and soul.
Brown describes the barracks (a female reporter is not allowed in): Each cadet has a metal desk, chair and bed, all made by prison inmates. Brown loves it.
``Outside these walls, you are judged on other things: the car you drive, the clothes you wear, who your dad is, who you know,'' he says. ``In here, you are all judged on an equal basis, on how well you do.''
As Faulkner anxiously awaits her day in court, it's sometimes hard to concentrate on anything else. She says so far she has a mediocre B average, with an A- in math. Citadel officials, she says with delight, were surprised about that high mark, ``in a subject girls usually don't do as well as boys in.''
Sometimes she heads to the mall, or lifts weights at a private gym, or reads more of Conroy's novels; in her bag today is ``Prince of Tides.'' A lot of time is spent worrying about the lawsuit or waiting for the weekends to drive home or visit friends.
Some friends have urged her to bank on her fame and consider law or politics. ``They say I'll never make any money in teaching. But who said I wanted to make money?''
She's not opposed to it, though, judging from her excitement at the figures being tossed around by Hollywood producers for a possible ``Shannon Faulkner'' TV movie. Any movie deal would hinge on her winning at trial.
The effect of her lawsuit reaches well beyond her. For Black, it means few in town will offer him business. Money has gotten so tight, he said, he can't afford a secretary and at times he hasn't had the money to pay the phone bill.
The case has become an all-consuming cause for Black, who studied at Oxford with President Clinton (even went out with the same women, the lawyer says) and who grew up in Birmingham during the civil rights struggle. He also taught English at the Citadel a dozen years ago. The lawsuit eats 80 percent of his time and unless Faulkner wins, he doesn't get paid.
Because of an anonymous threat on her life, Faulkner lives with Black, his wife and three young children. He then removed the street number from his house.
Back home in Powdersville, Faulkner's father's fencing company has suffered too from customers who don't fancy his daughter. Vandals spray-painted the family home, tampered with the swimming pool and egged her car. ``This is all about tradition,'' says Ed Faulkner. ``That's all they can come up with: It's 150 years of tradition. They don't even know why they are holding on to it.''
Her mom teaches at Wren High, where students have belittled her and whose school officials have asked Shannon not to wear shirts with the school's name on them during her interviews.
Every day, Faulkner gets mail from people she does not know. Some of it is admiring.
From Louisville, high school student Sarah Radmacher wrote to tell Faulkner that she has sent this message to the president of the Citadel, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Claudius E. Watts III:
``Tell me sir, what does that little piece of paper called the Constitution mean to you...wake up and smell the 1990s.''
Faulkner laughs, and rifles through more of the day's mail. There's another postcard from an anonymous woman in the Air Force. She has dropped Faulkner a stream of cards from around the country with this same handwritten message: ``Give 'em hell, Shannon.''
by CNB