Outrage at the Citadel

CHARLESTON, S.C. — At first glance, the home team section at the Citadel / Virginia Military Institute basketball game here last Saturday night looked like one gray sea of sameness. Knobs, as freshmen at this 154-year-old institution are known, sat shoulder to shoulder, their battleship-colored uniforms merging as one. They wore shiny black shoes built to maintain their required 120 strides per minute and hair that challenged the word “short.” Suddenly, a cheer went out in a voice no Citadel man would venture to claim.

“Let’s go, Bulldogs!” shouted Nancy Mace, one of two remaining women in the 1,800-cadet Citadel population. Mace’s enthusiasm was easily matched by the all-male throng around her. But the high spirits could only momentarily mask a mood of tense divisiveness that had settled over the fortress-like campus on the fringes of colonial Charleston since shortly before Christmas, when two of four female cadets who entered the school last fall abruptly resigned.

Once again, the Citadel was in the forefront of sexual politics in America, and questions piled up: Had the administration ignored warning signs of brutal hazing, had the state failed to help the institution change, would more legal battles ensue? And what would become of the two remaining women cadets, and the many more who hoped to follow in their footsteps?

The departure of Jeanie Mentavlos and Mace’s roommate, Kim Messer, both 19, amid charges of brutal hazing and horrible sexual harassment, put a lie to any notion that an institution that has spent a century and a half building “the Citadel man” might finally adapt to coeducation. Early, optimistic reports of the smooth assimilation of the first four women to enter the school under a federal court mandate suddenly looked foolish.

“It seemed like it was way too quiet,” noted Shannon Faulkner, who broke the school’s gender line in 1995 but lasted less than a day as a Citadel cadet. “Everything seemed to be going along flawlessly, and that doesn’t happen.”

What did happen, according to Harvey Messer of Clover, S.C., is that his daughter was “terrorized.” Moreover, the retired Army master sergeant said, “My daughter told me she reported a lot of this stuff to her company commander. Nothing was done. In fact, it got worse.”

Kim Messer charged that upperclassmen shoved her with a rifle, hit her and set her clothes on fire. Jeanie Mentavlos--whose 22-year-old brother, Michael, also left the Citadel in support of his sister, only a few units short of graduation--added that the two women had detergent poured in their mouths and that fellow cadets would croon crude songs about masturbation in their presence. Mentavlos said a cadet rubbed up against her while she was in formation. Both women said they had deodorant sprayed in their noses.

After issuing their charges and leaving the school, Messer and Mentavlos went into seclusion. For their parts, Mace and Petra Lovetinska, the 19-year-old daughter of Czech diplomats, stuck firmly to their policy of refusing to discuss anything about their experiences at the Citadel with anyone.

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Citadel officials stress that the school took swift action, suspending the two “rogue cadets” they say were responsible for the hazing episodes. Acting President Gen. Roger C. Poole said that five others have been relieved of their commands, and that a total of nine cadets face disciplinary charges. Poole, who took over in September following the resignation of Claudius Watts, an opponent of gender integration, said that even though the school had built in numerous “back doors for all the women” to ease their adjustment, “We were never foolish enough to think that after 154 years as a single-gender institution we could implement this [assimilation] plan without any problem at all.”

Then the Citadel went into high spin mode. Numerous school officials proudly pointed out that 29 young women have applied to the Citadel for next fall. They said the revelations by Messer and Mentavlos had prompted productive reflection and introspection. Various officials also suggested without getting specific that Mentavlos and Messer were doing poorly academically--and that by contrast, Mace and Lovetinska appear to be faring well. Many cadets echoed the administration’s position. The departing female cadets, according to junior Brett Strand, exhibited “a bad attitude, and perhaps a weak personal constitution as well.”

Meanwhile, the state of South Carolina, which provides about $12 million in funding each year for the Citadel, has launched a criminal investigation of the hazing and sexual harassment charges. The school also receives federal dollars through the Reserve Officer Training Corps program, and the U.S. Justice Department, charged with overseeing gender integration at the Citadel, said the FBI is investigating the incidents as well.

Lawyers for Mentavlos and Messer failed to respond to numerous interview requests. Citadel officials, however, said they were resigned to the idea that the two young women, who have enrolled at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, will probably file civil lawsuits soon.

On a campus where delicate palmetto trees are dwarfed by massive, walled buildings that would be at home in tales of medieval knighthood, there was a clear effort last week as classes resumed following the long holiday break to maintain a business-as-usual demeanor. Toting their regulation black canvas briefcases, cadets in gray marched crisply across the broad central quad where the weekly Friday afternoon dress parade was canceled 15 minutes before it was to begin, apparently to ward off a media frenzy. (Cold weather--it was about 45 degrees--was the official explanation.)

But to some extent, appearances were deceptive. One faculty member, who asked that his name not be used, said he bypassed his scheduled lectures last week and instead held a colloquy with his students about what had happened. His all male students were largely indignant, this professor said, because they felt the complaints of two female former cadets had subjected their school to embarrassment and ridicule.

Philip W. Leon, an English professor who specializes in the literature of Mark Twain, said the irony was that “a 19-year-old immature jerk”--the since-suspended cadet who allegedly masterminded the hazing episodes--”placed us in this awful position.” While conceding that the Citadel did make every possible effort to resist admitting women, Leon saw other factors at work.

“I think the root cause is immaturity--you have a 19-year-old who is in his barrack and who does not understand that what he does can reach out to a very long distance,” he said. “If we as faculty members thought for a moment that there was any sort of institutionalized brutality at the Citadel, we wouldn’t stay here. We’re professors, not crazed Army officers. What went on was absolutely shocking.”

Not everyone was so astonished. Longtime Citadel-watchers noted the absence of official reaction from the statehouse in Columbia, where much of the legislature opposed admitting women in the first place. The Citadel received no additional state funding to develop a gender-assimilation plan; by contrast, its archrival, VMI, secured a multimillion-dollar state grant to facilitate its court-ordered shift to coeducation this fall.

Far from a feeling of outrage, in fact, there was a widespread sense that bringing four women into a school that still provides students with a handbook outlining “The Code of the Gentleman In or Out of the Service” was bound to backfire. “There was a strong feeling here that the Citadel should never have had to admit women in the first place, and so whatever happened served them right,” said Greenville attorney Suzanne E. Coe, who filed the lawsuit that resulted in Faulkner’s brief career at the school.

Particularly when it is imposed from outside, the Citadel and its home state resist change, Coe noted. “Have you seen the bumper stickers that say ‘I Don’t Care How You Do It Up North?’ ” she asked.

Without apology, South Carolina still flies the Confederate flag from state buildings. South Carolinians still take pride in the fact that the first shots of the Civil War were fired from Charleston’s Ft. Sumter--by Citadel graduates. In that context, 22-year-old Faulkner said the shaky start to coeducation at the Citadel was little wonder. From her apartment near the Greenville, S.C., campus of Furman College, where she is a junior, Faulkner said, “All I can say is, I’m not surprised.”

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Citadel officials soundly decry hazing as illegal and unacceptable. Even so, they say such incidents are by no means peculiar to a formerly all-male military college. While expressing concern that the school’s compromised image might hamper faculty members from publishing in prestigious professional journals, for example, Leon searched his computer for hazing citations on the World Wide Web. He found one notable episode in which a Texas fraternity initiate lost a testicle in a hazing prank the day after Messer and Mentavlos raised their grievances at the Citadel.

And while officially condemned, ritual initiation remains an entrenched element of the Citadel’s “fourth-class” system. Under this system, one cadet explained, “you spend two years building them down and two years building them up.” Heaping physical labor, discipline and harsh invectives on first-year students helps build character and camaraderie, this theory holds.

Yet even without the cheery interpretations from the Citadel’s public relations office, two of the four women who entered the school last fall appear to have settled in. While Mace was watching her team go down to basketball defeat against VMI, Lovetinska was studying in the library, where she spends most Saturday nights. The following day, she was awarded a medal for excellence--in judo.

It was Lovetinska, a tall, strapping young woman, who shaved her head last fall to make sure her hair was as short as that of male cadets. Messer and Mentavlos then joined in the home-shorn haircut event. A campus barber later repaired their patchy coiffeurs, and the three cadets were disciplined with extra marches and confinement to their barracks. Otherwise, Citadel spokesman Col. Terry Leedom said, Lovetinska has been a near-model cadet, maintaining what is described as a good scholastic record in a freshman class where grade-point averages hover around 1.7 on a four-point scale.

Mace has racked up a 3.75 first semester grade-point average, and regularly “makes the guys look stupid,” one faculty member observed, in physical endurance contests. When school started in the fall, first-year cadets were required to do 18 push-ups at their first training session. Mace handily performed 56. Her physical stamina is often cited with admiration by male cadets--who are also often quick to point out that Messer and Mentavlos suffered stress fractures early in the semester and therefore were excused from much of the rigorous training regimen.

But if there had not been a real Nancy Mace to apply to the Citadel, campus advocates of coeducation--if any would admit to existing--might have rushed to their laboratories to clone her. As a high school student in Goose Creek, outside Charleston, Mace’s grades would tumble when she was not swimming competitively. One of her two sisters graduated from West Point. Their high school teacher mother is enrolled in a doctoral program and their father, Gen. James E. Mace, is a Citadel hero, the school’s most decorated alumnus. A former tactical officer at the Citadel, he has retired from the military and now works for the state of South Carolina.

In a halftime conversation at the basketball game, the Maces said they did not encourage their youngest daughter to pursue the intense, demanding environment of her father’s alma mater and were surprised when she filled out an application the day after the school was ordered to admit women. Their daughter was well aware of their opposition to coeducation at the Citadel in the first place, they added.

“She knew her mom and dad were not for integrating the Citadel with women,” said Gen. Mace, who spent much of the summer helping to prepare his daughter for the physical and mental challenges to come. “I think she did it for herself, because she wanted this kind of education.”

But for the moment, anyway, the kind of education offered by the Citadel is not entirely clear. “I’m worried,” said Lt. Col. John Cassidy, a staff psychologist. “I’m very troubled about the future.” Under present circumstances, said Cassidy, who is also a Citadel alumnus, he would not want either of his two daughters to attend the school.