Alarm Clock Rings at The Citadel

For 153 years The Citadel, the state-supported male bastion in Charleston, S.C., has turned out cadets drilled in military tactics and history and steeped in Southern manners. It would seem rational to expect restraint, if not courtesy, from its students, but ugly behavior was the rule last year when male cadets celebrated the withdrawal of the first woman to be admitted to the academy, Shannon Faulkner. This year, somehow, a sense of good manners seems revived. Cadets greeted four young women in a low-key, appropriate way.

The change was long in coming. The Citadel fought for years to stay all-male, agreeing to admit qualified women only after the U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down the all-male policy at The Citadel’s fellow public military college, the Virginia Military Institute.

Faulkner had to wage a long legal fight to win a federal court order forcing open The Citadel’s door; though she dropped out within days after arriving at the school, citing stress and isolation, the door never really slammed again.

The four new female cadets--Petra Lovetinska, Nancy Mace, Jeanie Mentavlos and Kim Messer--may escape the sense of isolation that plagued Faulkner, if not the rigors of “Hell Week.” They received ultrashort haircuts. (Their male counterparts have shaved heads, which give cadets the moniker “knobs.”) And their day began as roughly as the men’s, with a loud rendition of the heavy metal anthem, “Hell’s Bells.” It was an awakening no doubt as wrenching as the school’s own.