THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 19, 1995 TAG: 9508180600
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Shannon Faulkner says she wants the same sort of Citadel experience male cadets get. You don't get that from a private room, the haircut of your choice and lowered fitness standards. The guys who've gone around all week whispering Faulkner fat jokes would add, You don't get it from the infirmary, either. That's unfunny, but it's true.
Let me be clear: I wish Shannon Faulkner had never gone near the Citadel. It bothers me not at all that women's taxes contribute to it but women can't be cadets. Deny the dwindling number of single-sex schools public funding and you deny middle-class students educations that serve many women, men and the country well. My taxes contribute, too, to the service academies, which admit both sexes and hold them both to at least the same academic standard.
My taxes contribute to all sorts of things I'll never experience, some by eligibility, some by smarts, many by choice. Weaned on the ``he can't even run his own life/I'll be damned if he'll run mine'' approach to authority, I wouldn't last 24 hours in the armed services, and half of that in the brig. But I can appreciate people who offer that kind of discipline, who seek it, who meet it - and who acknowledge when they don't measure up without denigrating those who do.
Every place needn't be for everybody, as the promoters of ``diversity'' argue - except here. Why?
The push to integrate the Citadel (and Virginia Military Institute) seems to me to have little to do with equality and much to do with anti-maleness in the feminist movement and the anti-military bent of its liberal coed cohort. The all-male experience is anathema to the one (though the all-female experience is sacrosanct). What they see as the lockstep warrior is anathema to the other.
Both, ostensibly, are out to show that anything men can do women can do too; in the physical realm, that can mean not do as well, only well enough, as they define it. Yet both, subliminally, are out to show that an experience which women aren't equal to, or from which men prefer to exclude women, needn't, shouldn't exist. It's the difference between ``If you can't stand the heat, get out of the Citadel'' and ``If you can't stand the heat, make 'em turn it down.
It's the flip side of the silly flap over the swimsuit competition in the Miss America Pageant. The chic view starts with the obvious fact that a woman doesn't need beauty to be worthy, can be admired solely for her brain, and ends up implying that beauty is worthless, unadmirable, shouldn't enter the equation at all. In the Citadel case, for ``beauty'' substitute ``brawn.''
In the Citadel case, these critics' point is not to toughen up Shannon but to soften up the Citadel.
At least if Faulkner had to try the Citadel, she should've arrived as physically fit as she could be. That's not a question of a woman's having to be better than men in the same situation. It's not a question of her ordeal to get in wearing her down physically and emotionally. Of course it did. But so do war and leadership and, lots of times, just life.
It's a question of an individual doing an individual's best to measure up, and taking the consequences of coming up short - if not by the measure required of males at least by the measure required of female. Yet it will take a court order to get her out even if, like 16 men so far, she washes out. That's not fair.
This isn't fair, either, or funny, but it is laughable: According to Knight-Ridder, ``Faulkner's attorneys are seeking contempt charges against Citadel spokesman Terry Leedom for talking about Faulkner's weight.'' In a hearing before a federal judge several weeks ago, the Citadel argued, vainly, that Faulkner isn't fit enough to become a cadet. The judge ruled not that physical fitness isn't germane (it certainly is) but that the school had no standards by which to determine Faulkner's fitness, though the school used armed-forces weight charts. The judge also ordered the attorneys not to discuss her medical condition. Why not? By school rules, cadets have until October to meet school fitness standards. Does Faulkner get to set her own?
Shannon Faulkner hasn't let women down. The fate of females was never on her shoulders. And the fate, reputation and rigor of the Citadel shouldn't be. MEMO: Beth Barber is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB