You're Wrong About - Shannon Faulkner & Sex Discrimination at The Citadel

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Mike tells Sarah how a troll-ish experiment turned a South Carolina teenager into one of the most maligned women of the 1990s. Digressions include Sally Ride, Anne Hathaway and, as usual, "Newsies." Mike struggles with the word "infirmary" throughout.The pictures of Shannon we discuss in this episode are here.Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks! Catherine Manegold's "In Glory's Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, the Citadel, and a Changing America"Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”Marching In Step: The Citadel And Post World War II America A Judicial Blow for "Jane Crowism" at The Citadel in Faulkner v. JonesThe Citadel's Lone Wolf, Shannon FaulknerSurviving the Company of MenShannon Faulkner and The Citadel: The Effects of Using Litigation as an Instrument of Social ReformSaving The Males: The Sociological Implications of the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel (since we recorded this episode we've learned that the author of this piece has been accused of sexual harassment. Apologies for not mentioning it on the show!)Single-Sex Education: New Perspectives and Evidence on a Continuing ControversySupport the show

Could it be I have like this face that like through no fault of my own just like permanently inquisitive and that's why my life has been this way. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we distract you from the horrible follies of today by talking about the horrible follies of yesteryear. Yesteryear follies, those are our favorite. Yeah, yester follies. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic.

And if you want to support the show, we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About and there's lots of other ways to support the show. And I'm speeding through this again because I want to tell Sarah about Shannon Faulkner. I'm so excited. So I texted you, I think like three weeks ago now, and I was like, Sarah, do you know who or what Shannon Faulkner is? And you said, absolutely not. And then I basically instructed you to treat Shannon Faulkner the way I treat John Benet Ramsey. Which is funny because I have never told you my intentions to do a John Benet Ramsey episode.

But you just know that someday I will relent and do it. But yeah, I don't know where this is going and I know that you're very happy about that. I'm so excited. Okay. So I think it's important to cover Shannon Faulkner because she was sort of one of the canonically maligned women of the 1990s, but she was also double maligned because she was almost instantly and completely erased. Yeah, she wasn't on any of the VH1 countdowns. Were you aware of this controversy over whether or not women could attend the Citadel? Yeah, I know that there was, is this a military academy in like upstate New York or something?

South Carolina. South Carolina. All right, those are completely different places. I don't know where I got that. Yeah, I know that that happened in the 90s. And I feel as if the concept of women in military academies and women, just women in the military generally feels to me like one of the issues that felt like it was really important and divisive in the 90s. And I feel like I grew up hearing a lot about secondhand. Yes. Oh my god. G.I. Jane, an iconic film. We spent years debating this. This is one of the longest civil rights trials in U.S. history.

It's also one of the most expensive. I mean, this to me is the progression that we're going to track in this episode. And I think something really important about social change. So Shannon Faulkner tries to get into the Citadel. She can't get in because she's a woman. The case resolves itself in a very unsatisfying way, which we will get to. And 25 years later, for the first time, the Citadel has a female student body president. It's called something different because there's like special names for everything there because it's all military-ish. Right. A journalist goes to this female student body president and says, well, you know, what do you think about Shannon Faulkner and this massive nationwide controversy?

And this first female student body president says, who's Shannon Faulkner? Oh my. So there's no Shannon Faulkner plaque and no kind. That suggests that like the school, because schools are so decisive in the lore that their students become adults by believing. You know, I mean, the spirit of Thomas Jefferson is like wandering around the grounds of UVA. Right. Probably drunkenly. And there's also something I think about sort of fights for social justice where entrenched institutions will fight and fight and fight. And the minute they lose, they'll say, oh, we always wanted to do this. It's not a big deal. And then of course, we erase the entire fight and people who had their lives ruined. Those are the first people to go.

So that's basically what this episode is about is how all of this happens to Shannon. Well, I'm so excited for this. Feels if I'm about to get on a slow, dreadful roller coaster. It is slow and dreadful, but it does have a happy ending. Oh, wow. So I'll just spoil it for you. Okay. Well, that almost never happens. So we're going to start out with a scene. It is December of 1992. Shannon is in a social studies class. They are discussing a sports illustrated article

that is about hazing practices at this military school called DeCittadel. We don't know a ton about Shannon and her upbringing and what she's like. What we do know is she's popular. She's in the marching band. She plays sports. She's an excellent student. Her mom is a high school teacher. Her dad runs a fence building company. The author of the book about her called In Glory's Shadow makes a big deal out of the fact that she was born prematurely and she sort of she was a fighter her whole life. Okay. Which honestly feels a little like a little projection to me of like you don't have much

to work with. I would be fine with never hearing another person described as a fighter ever again. This is an excerpt from a Susan Feludi essay in The New Yorker, which is one of the best essays about this case. She says, One could scrounge around in Faulkner's childhood for the key to what made her take on the Citadel. But there's little point in a detailed inspection of family history because there's no real mystery here. What is most striking about Shannon herself is that she's not particularly unusual. She reads novels by Tom Clancy and John Grisham has worked at a local daycare center

is partial to places like Benigans. She wants a college education so she can support herself and have a career as a teacher or a journalist. She hasn't yet decided which. She might do a stint in the military. She might not. She's in many ways representative of the average striving lower middle class teenage girl circa 1994 who intends to better herself and is not intend to achieve that betterment through a man. In fact, she is not for a moment entertained such a possibility. So this is something that comes up in a lot of the accounts of Shannon when she's a kid and also later on that she doesn't seem to give a shit what other people think. In contrast to a lot of the people that we've talked about on the show, she's actually

very clear about what she wants and very confident in asking for it. So there's times later when journalists will call her and be like, Hey, can I do an interview with you? And she just says like, No, and hangs up the phone. That's great. So as they're having this debate, the class seizes on this weird detail about the Citadel that there's only two all male military schools in America that are state funded. These are public institutions that do not allow women. There's one in Virginia and there's one in South Carolina, the Citadel. And Shannon immediately is like, My tax dollars are going to this school and I cannot attend. This just seems fundamentally like bullshit to me. Does she live in South Carolina? Oh, yeah, I guess she would because

then that's why she's entitled to an education there. Yeah, she's in powdersville, South Carolina, which is sort of across the state, the Citadel's in Charleston. Okay. And so this is December of her senior year and she's sort of in the midst of applying for a bunch of colleges for the following year. Two weeks later, she goes to the guidance counselor's office and she's applying to four colleges. And so they fill out the first three applications. And then Shannon tells the guidance counselor, I also want to apply to the Citadel and the guidance counselor's like, but that's only open to men. And Shannon's like, here's what I want you to do. She asks the guidance counselor to take all of her transcripts and all of the documents that the school has on her and white

out all references to gender. So instead of being on like the women's volleyball team, they white it out. So it just says volleyball team. I love this. I already love this. I know she's running an experiment. She also gets the guidance counselor to write her a recommendation letter with no pronouns. Nice. So the guidance counselor writes this very carefully. So it's like, anything Shannon puts Shannon's mind to, Shannon can achieve. Do we know very much about this guidance counselor who has been on this because they seem really cool. I love that all of the adults around her are like, this is trolley, but also go for it. This is like tricksterishness motivated by a sense of injustice. Yes. When her mom hears about this plan, apparently her mom just

says classic Shannon. She does this. It all seems like fun and games until someone ends up in a three year long civil rights lawsuit. And also it turns out that at the Citadel, a couple years previously, there had been a relatively well known football player named Shannon. That's not a super uncommon boy's name. So the people at the Citadel see this application from Shannon Faulkner. They just assume, well, it's obviously a boy because why the hell would a woman ever apply here? Everybody knows that women aren't allowed in. So on January 22nd of 1993, Shannon Faulkner gets an acceptance letter that says, dear Mr. Faulkner, welcome to the Citadel, basically. Nice. And so the high school where her mom teaches, the assistant principal has a son

who attends the Citadel. Shannon's mom starts saying, LOL, my daughter got into the Citadel. Rumor of this goes through the high school. Then the rumor ends up with this whatever sophomore at the Citadel. And so he is the one that then contacts like the board of the Citadel and is like, do you guys know that you admitted a woman? Oh no. And so two weeks after she gets the acceptance letter, she gets another letter revoking the acceptance. It's written very dickishly. They send her a letter and then they send a separate letter in the same envelope to her mom, basically scolding her. Like, why did you let your daughter do this? Oh my god, she's an adult. Yes. And also Shannon has now been accepted into the other three schools. I have no evidence for this,

but it is very possible that if the school hadn't revoked her admission, Shannon would have just gone to one of these other schools. If I were her, my response would have been like, cool, that's funny. I'll go to wherever else I applied. But then if they revoked it, I'd be like, fuck you guys. Yes. Yeah. So basically, classic Shannon, she goes through the yellow pages, she finds a civil rights lawyer, like this super awesome lady who does like abortion cases and stuff and walks her through the whole thing and says, do I have a case? And the lawyer's like, yeah, I don't see why not. This is also the rare case of a malign 90s woman who wasn't dragged into the spotlight by her bangs. And so the first thing the lawyer does is she calls a press

conference and that attracts the ACLU because remember how I mentioned there's only one other military institute in the country that is publicly funded that doesn't allow in women? Yes. That school is called the Virginia Military Institute and it's getting sued by the Department of Justice for not allowing women in. And one of its main arguments is that there's no demand. All male military institution from women. So the ACLU is fighting back against this idea that there's no demand from women to go to military institutions. And here comes Shannon, who is demanding to attend a military institution. And so the ACLU offers all of their legal services for free. So by the time they actually file the case in March of 1993, she has eight lawyers.

It seems like a lot of big cases happen this way, where it's like, you have a legal concept that you need to find a vehicle for. And then the plaintiff is like this person who sort of the luck of the numbers game of American populations like embodies the problems that you were trying to address. Yes. And we often pretend that it's about this individual when it's very obviously about this larger issue and the precedent that it's going to set. Right. And where they have to be like, I volunteer as tribute. Yeah. So what do you know about the Citadel? Have you ever heard of this before this controversy? Yeah, I've heard that word. I know that the Citadel is a school that basically fought to keep women out. That's really all I know. It's also a very weird thing

because people are going to get mad at me for this, but it's sort of army cosplay. I mean, West Point and these other official military institutions that we have in America are, they have official relationships with the military. It's like a pipeline into the military. The Citadel is just its own thing. So only around a third of graduates end up going into the military. Oh. There's all of this sort of pomp and circumstance within the school. Like the students have these ranks that are sort of quasi military ranks and there's this vocabulary that you have to use and you have to stand at attention and say sir and all this kind of stuff. But those are just rules at the Citadel. They're not in any way officially linked up to the military.

So it's interesting that the school is like silly and the lawsuit is kind of revealing their silliness in an uncomfortable way perhaps because they're like, we can't allow women in because it would interfere with the importance of us pretending to be soldiers. Yes. It's basically theater camp. So I read two histories of the Citadel and most institutions in America, if you look into them, have pretty rough history. The Citadel maybe has the worst history I've ever seen. It's like a fucking SNL sketch of how offensive can history be. So the school was founded in 1822 to respond to a slave uprising. It's actually a bit of a year wrong about the uprising was organized by a guy named Denmark Vizy. The narrative was always

that this was a sprawling plot of all these people and hundreds were involved and it was this massive conspiracy. And when historians went back in the 1960s to actually look at the primary documents, they found that it was basically just a bunch of rumors. It wasn't planned. They had no date. It was just something that they talked about as like, wouldn't it be cool if? So academics now refer to it as a legal lynching where it was essentially just an excuse to execute Denmark Vizy and his quote unquote co-conspirators. That's awful. So that in itself is a really gross story. But then what happened right after was there were all these vigilante squads that wandered around Charleston like burning down churches. And the reason the Citadel was founded

was to train quote unquote citizen soldiers to prevent any future uprisings of enslaved peoples. Like that was the point. Oh my God. Well, do you see how like letting a female student into the school would sully its beautiful history? Oh my God. Oh, you're right. I really was ready to be like, I don't know. But like, yeah, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Eventually it turns into just a normal military college. And then according to its graduates, people at the Citadel fired the first shots of the Civil War. I didn't really look into whether that was true or not, just because it's like such a big part of the lore of the school that they're really proud of this, which I feel like is like that in itself is telling whether or not it's true. Right. Like

either it really happened or it didn't happen and they thought it would be cool if it did happen. Yes. Most history is like kind of made up, but then it's more useful in revealing like who the people telling it are. Yes. So over time, the Citadel becomes an increasingly closed loop. It becomes more conservative over time because the more it drifts away from the general progressiveness of the country, you know, 1960s student protests, etc., it pushes back against all of these things. And over time, it starts to attract students that are interested in this sort of increasingly archaic lifestyle and mores. It's like 4chan. It is. Like it becomes this distillation chamber and also the alumni network. They also protect the school. So every

once in a while, an outsider, a sort of reformer will be appointed as the president and will try to institute reforms. And then the entire alumni network threatens to pull donations. There's also a series of scandals that make it even worse. So I'm going to send you a photo. Okay. We're looking at a photo of, it looks like a high school portrait of a guy who I got to say has like young farmer and babe energy. Yes. This looks like it was taken in the 60s or the 70s because I'm seeing kind of what looks like a loud patterned tie. And he's got some thick glasses, some sticky out ears. And he looks just like a lovely and ungainly boy in a large man's body of like 17 or 18. This is Harry De La Roche. He is 17 when this is taken. He ends up getting

into the Citadel. And the minute he gets into the Citadel, he experiences this absurd system they have of hazing cadets. It began as an explicit way to build solidarity and to build school spirit. So it used to be they would give you this history handbook of the school and you had to basically memorize it. If you were a freshman, you had to sort of stand at attention. And if an upperclassman came up to you and was like, who was the president of the school in 1924, you'd have to say like Norman Poindexter or whatever. And then they would correct you or not correct you. You know what built school spirit? Acapella. Acapella built school spirit. Ty harmonizing with someone you don't trust. I mean, it ultimately seems very silly to me, but also it was designed

as something that would be sort of shared knowledge between students at the school, like a way of developing like an inside language for people within this institution. But so what happens is over time, this hazing just becomes more and more brutal. And also because it's a closed loop, whatever you experience as a freshman, you're going to do to the freshman when you're a senior. So the first week of school is known as Hell Week. And by the time Harry De La Roche gets there in 1976, it's just like beatings and stuff. It's not creative. No. This is the most you criticize them I've ever heard. I love what you're saying, because that obviously it's horrible, but also they're not even doing

what they said they were doing. Right. What happens? What kind of stuff do kids have to endure? One of the things that happens to Harry is they cut his shins with a razor blade. What? And then they pour shoe polish on them. They're like, I can't cut your face because you got to go work the streets tonight. I mean, a big thing is sort of keeping your shoes polished and keeping your uniform crisp and tight. And so this, I believe, is a punishment for having scuffed shoes. Another big thing is technically upperclassmen have the right to take away food from freshmen. So if an upperclassman demands food, you have to give it over. No. So for weeks, Harry just isn't eating,

because every time he sits down to eat in the cafeteria, some upperclassman comes and takes away his food. You know what's funny is that when I was a teenager, I think this stuff didn't hit me as hard because I was like, I'm basically an adult. And now that I see teenagers as children, I'm just like, how are adults condoning this? I mean, at various points, the teachers try to push back against this because the teachers are like, people are coming to class and they haven't eaten and they haven't slept. Yeah. How the hell are people learning anything? Again, closed loop. A lot of the adults that are around, a lot of the adults in the administration,

they went to this school. They think that it builds character and not only is it not seen as a problem, this is seen as an essential component of masculinity. You have to experience abuse. You know, it builds character working in a waffle house. Do that. Those people can de-escalate like nobody. I think that the thing that we think of as masculinity is something that you basically need to be abused to become, but that's not actually masculinity. I know. It doesn't relate to being male. It just relates to having been abused. Yes. And we just confuse the two things. Thanksgiving of his first year, Harry, he says that his mom has terminal cancer and he has to go

home for Thanksgiving early. He's lying just to get out of the school. And once he gets home, he's in his head has decided he's not going to go back to the school. He's like, I can't take this anymore. Because his dad is like this military asshole. He's got a history of abusing Harry. It's really terrible. He's not going to let him quit. And so brace yourself, Harry De La Roche murders his entire family. Oh, wow. Yeah. He kills his mom and his dad and his two brothers. Yeah. Because this is such a huge national story at the time, it contributes to the closed loop nature of the Citadel because who wants to apply to a school where the hazing practices are so severe that they lead to an outcome like this?

It's only going to be people who don't see the hazing as a deal breaker or are specifically attracted by the hazing. This closed loop thing gets even worse in the 1980s. Like everything. The school started allowing in black students in 1966, but it did so very quietly. The school was never more than five or 6% black. What's their student body on the whole? Is this in like the low thousands? How big is it? 2000 students total. Oh, that's small. So in 1986, there is a student named Kevin Nesmith who is black. And this is super fucked up. A bunch of upperclassmen think that he's like not pulling his weight. So as a quote unquote, galactically large fucking quote marks, prank. They dress up in clan robes and go into his room at night with a burning cross.

Oh my God. He is okay. Nothing really happens. They sort of go in there and they shout at him. And his roommate who is white wakes up and is like, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Get the fuck out of here. And like it's just chaos. This also becomes a national story because it's fucking outrageous. Yeah. Kevin ends up quitting the school pretty soon after because yes, of course. Yeah. Meanwhile, all five of the kids who dressed up in clan robes as a quote unquote prank end up graduating. Right. They're not given any major punishment. This is the kind of wonderful culture that a female student body might challenge. You know, you just can't like girls and they'll ruin everything. What's so fascinating about this is that this also ends

up reinforcing the closed loop thing because what happens to minority enrollment after this? Yeah. Black people basically stop applying to the school because of course they do. Yeah. If you have a hundred black students sprinkled into a culturally white institution, the culture can remain fundamentally the same, it seems like. Exactly. And I just think there's this kind of cultural stereotype that as the country becomes more progressive, all of these conservative institutions will sort of inevitably come along, like, you know, be dragged by the tide of history or whatever. But what we tend to see is that a lot of these institutions actually become more conservative because they feel like they're the only ones left. So by the 1990s, by the time

Shannon applies, it's actually like part of the school's identity that we're one of the last schools to not allow in women. Like, that's actually a huge draw for students and like a big part of the way that they think about themselves. It's not a cute look. It's not cute. So next section, we're eventually going to talk about the court case. But there's about six months before the court case really happens. There's all these sort of preliminary hearings and motions, blah, blah, blah. What happens almost immediately after Shannon files the lawsuit is that she becomes a massive celebrity. Oh my. She's on the news. She starts getting recognized at restaurants. Wow. And what's amazing, because I spent a lot of time on LexisNexis, almost all of the attention

is negative. Yeah. I feel like in the 90s, there was what I would almost call a moral panic. It was like a low grade moral panic about women invading masculine institutions. Yes. And a huge percentage of the pushback came from women. Really? This is a letter to The New York Times that's published in 1994. As I read the article, I wondered why any woman would want to spend her college years at an institution like the Citadel. Just to prove a point, come on. Well, she doesn't have to attend. Yeah. But there's, I mean, so much of the discourse is like, why is this pushy woman faking her way into the Citadel when the Citadel isn't somewhere where women need to be anyway? Well, okay. By that logic, it's a place where no one needs to be and it just shouldn't exist,

because maybe if that's the solution everyone's happiest with, then fine. One of the notes that Shannon gets is, you homely feminist. I'm sorry for you. You have to force yourself on men to feel important. Women are the cruelest to other women sometimes. It's weird, man. There's a fucking shocking letter to the editor in New York Times by a female World War II veteran. And she ends the letter with, it's up to you. Men may harass women. They don't harass ladies. Can all of you just fuck off because you're idiots and it's not your business? Also, men fuck pumpkins. Like the harassment has nothing to do with your quality of character, Ms. Wack Lady. Shannon also starts to see t-shirts around town. One of them says,

the Citadel, 1952 Bulldogs and One Bitch. There's a billboard in Charleston where somebody writes die, Shannon, in big red paint and it stays up for a couple days before they manage to take it down. Charleston should stick to ghost tours. This is from the Susan Feludi article about the super fucked up harassment of Shannon and her parents at their house. Unseen hands have drained the swimming pool, delivered death threats, painted epithets and taunts across the clapboard and turned wheelies through the flower beds. The gas tank on Shannon's mother's car was pried open, someone driving a Ford Bronco mowed down the mailbox. Shannon's mother called the county sheriff's department about the vandalism, but in Anderson County,

which has been home to many Citadel graduates, the deputy who arrived was not particularly helpful. Well, if you're going to mess with the Citadel, you're just going to have to expect that. Was it OJ? Yes, twist. A lot of it really feeds into this weird narrative that she's pushy and that also that she's a lesbian. Like it's very interesting to me how quickly people at the time needed to call her a lesbian. Yeah. Like that's not even relevant. That's just like a way to discredit someone, I guess, is to call them gay. Sure. Also, I'm sure a lesbian would love to go to school with 2000 dicks. Like use your heads, dummies. This is actually, Shannon actually says this in an interview later. They're asking her about these rumors that she's a lesbian and

she's like, why would I go to a school full of men? Yeah, for serious. She's actually pretty good at pushing back on this stuff. There's a reporter that's sort of following her around on her daily whatever and somebody yells at her, you should be ashamed of yourself. And Shannon just immediately is like, tell me why the Constitution does not apply to me. And the person just like keeps walking away. It's funny because like the response to this is that she's getting hazed by America. That's good, Sarah. Thank you. So basically, I want to go through sort of the court cases. There's a lot of weird back and forth that I'm going to skip. One of her lawyers says they fought us on every grain of sand. But I want to talk about the arguments why women shouldn't be

allowed into the Citadel. You know, this will be fun because we're having kind of a renaissance of completely ridiculous legal arguments. So I am excited. So there's basically three arguments. The first, and it sounds like I'm trolling, the first argument is that women are inferior to men. There's some very interesting legal scholarship. One of the people who actually testifies on Shannon's behalf has written a bunch of articles on the arguments that the Citadel makes. His name is Michael Kimmel and he points out that there's a difference in the law between gender discrimination and race discrimination because race discrimination, the underlying assumption is that there is no difference between the races. Whereas with gender discrimination,

there is an underlying difference. So it's okay under certain circumstances to treat women differently than men. Right. I think you can say in a broad way that on the whole, women are smaller than men. If you pick a random woman and a random man, the woman will tend to be smaller. But then you get to like, push and push and push that until you've elasticized it into this thing of like, women are these tiny, weak, little, crunchy core with marshmallow around it. Right. You know, you just like, you extrapolate a fact that's irrelevant to the thing you're trying to talk about to something that is claiming to be relevant. Right. I think a good contrast is that Hooters has argued successfully in court that they're only going

to hire women because that's a central requirement of the job of working at Hooters. Whereas police departments have argued unsuccessfully for this. Yeah. Because a man could have breasts. Yes. But he couldn't flirt with a straight customer in the same way. Exactly. So this was the main argument of the Citadel was basically women couldn't hack it and they aren't able to be cadets at the Citadel. It's funny to me that their argument that they're saying like, because of our wonderful special school, women can't keep up. And it's like, I got news for you. Your school is defined basically by the amount of abuse that its students are supposed to withstand. And if you're making the argument that women are inferior

at coping with abuse, then like, I don't know. I feel like you could counter that legally, Ethan. Yes. I mean, this is literally their argument. So this is an excerpt from Michael Kimmel's article on this. The adversarial model, the Citadel argued, is only effective for males. The rat line, the barracks lifestyle, the rigorous honor code, these were simply too much for women's purportedly fragile constitutions to bear. Women, the school claimed, were not capable of the ferocity required to make the program work. They are physically weaker, more emotional, and cannot take stress as well as men. What? The school cited more than 100 physical differences that resulted in a natural hierarchy between women and men, with men, of course, at the top.

If admitted, female cadets would break down crying and suffer psychological trauma from the rigors of the system. Oh, so they're saying that their male students are untraumatized. They're fine, obviously. Fascinating. I think all these people need to be stopped. I also, I love this, that one of the things that goes around is that the school has strict physical standards. So you have to be able to do 45 push-ups and 55 sit-ups in two minutes, and you have to be able to run two miles in 16 minutes. But then what's amazing about these fitness requirements is the school only passed those fitness requirements after Shannon Faulkner sued them. They're doing this specifically to keep Shannon out. Come on, you guys. You should

have made your physical requirements like wash his balls once a week and then be like, you have no balls, Shannon. What would he be washing? Bye. This is kind of a tangent, but the literature on women being inferior to men led me to a bunch of old arguments that have been used throughout time for not allowing women into these educational institutions. Because their uteruses rove around their bodies and that makes them vulnerable. Literally, listen to this fucking quote. Oh my god. In what was the best-selling book on higher education of the entire century, Sex and Education from 1873, Edward C. Clarke, Harvard's first professor of education, predicted that if women went to college, their brains would grow heavier and their wombs would

atrophy. Oh, is it because the blood is going to the brain and the womb is naturally the first thing for the body to undeligate? Is that it? His main evidence for this is the correlation between women who have college educations tend to have fewer children. That's because they're older when they start having children and also probably they're more likely to have the means to practice birth control. And correlation is not causation, my guy. Yeah. So the school's second argument, which is slightly more convincing but still not that convincing, is that women and men each have a right to go to single-sex educational institutions. And so Shannon, if she attends the Citadel, she is depriving men of their right to be educated with other men. So she's closing

all the men's schools by attempting to enroll in this one. She's changing the fundamental nature of the education that is being offered. There's actually, they use the argument that it's a diversity in education argument that you should have the right, you know, you can go to a Catholic school, you can go to a Quaker school, or you can go to a male-only school. And so to maintain all of these choices, we can't dilute what is being offered. Like that is the central argument. Didn't you go to an all-girl school? Yeah, for five years. Okay, how do you feel about that? Hated it, sucked. Oh, really? I know that people have positive experiences at single-sex schools because I'm not one of them. That's the thing. I don't want to like hurt anybody's

feelings. I did look into the empirical evidence on same-sex education, and there's an extremely consistent relationship between attending a single-sex school, especially girls-only schools, and better SAT scores, better grades, better college admissions, etc. But what all of the research points out is that it's impossible to disentangle the effect of the single-sexness from the fact that most single-sex schools are private institutions to say that all girls high school in some posh suburb of Chicago or whatever, it's like 80% of our graduates go to college. It's like, well, those are a bunch of rich kids. Most of them probably would have gone to college anyway, so you can't really say that it's like the fact that they went to school with a bunch of girls

that made them successful. Yeah, I mean, something that I hear a lot is that girls are more likely to speak up if there aren't boys in the classroom. I've always spoken up in the classroom when I was in a girl's school between the ages of 8 and 13, and that might have contributed to it. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, in the literature, they mention that some kids would really benefit from a single-sex environment, but also other kids really wouldn't, and we don't have great ways of separating those kids. And some kids would benefit from Waldorf School, and some kids would benefit from playing a lot of hockey, and some kids would benefit from playing no sports, and kids are different. Exactly. So anyway, I mean, I have no interest in trying to change the fact that there are

single-sex schools, but essentially, as a legal argument, we must protect the right of boys to go to same-sex schools. It just doesn't really hold water legally, especially considering it's a publicly funded school, and there aren't any equivalent women's-only military institutions. A lot of it comes down to the fact that if there was a citadel for women, she would just go to that, and it wouldn't really be discrimination. Right. And so they're creating a situation where, for the state of South Carolina, to then have to start a horrible women's military academy. Exactly. So the third and final and kind of hilarious-ist argument for defending the citadel

is allowing women will destroy the citadel. Why ever will it do that? This is for Michael Kimmel's article. One of the citadel's expert witnesses, Major General Josiah Bunting III, suggested that women would be a toxic kind of virus that would destroy the citadel. Thanks! Adolescent males benefit from being able to focus exclusively on the task at hand without the intrusion of any sexual tension.

This is an institution for learning racism. If we allow women in, it will turn into a gentle sex comedy like porkies. I also love that sort of central to this argument, and you hear this in all of the discourse around this, is fucking showers. What? I feel like it can't be a moral panic unless showers are involved. So this is from a 1994 New York Times article. Weighing heaviest on the cadets' minds was the preservation of the all-male communal bathroom.

Uh-huh. The sharing of these stall-less showers and stall-less toilets is at the heart of the citadel experience, according to more than one cadet. What? It's so weird. Okay, my favorite thing about this is that these people have to, like, in legal language justify the absolutely bizarre and toxic culture that they have created at the school, and now are defending as if it is, like, the most illustrious of traditions. I mean, the shower thing I think is actually interesting because, to me, it illustrates the extent to which this isn't working for anyone. A lot of the cadets, when they're

interviewed by journalists, they'll say, like, if women are here, we can't be intimate with each other, and they're afraid of getting humiliated in front of a girl. If they're getting yelled at by an upperclassmen or forced to do push-ups or whatever, they don't want a girl to see that. I mean, something I wonder about a lot is, like, if you can't have physical affection, like, do you find closeness through fighting and conflict? And, like, this hazing thing, it's like, it's very physical. Yeah. It just feels like at every point, the arguments against letting Shannon in are just an argument against the school and this whole dumb system. It's like, just be intimate with each

other, be friendly and nice, form sustainable, mature relationships. You can just do that. It's the most amazing self-tell that these people are like, listen, I'm fine with being abused. I just don't want to be abused in front of a girl. And it's like, why are you fine with it not in front of a girl? I know. The head of the cadets, he's interviewed by Susan Feluti, and he says that not having women at the school makes them better at respecting women. It sounds like I'm summarizing that unfairly, but his actual quote is, the absence of women makes us understand them better in an aesthetic kind of way. We appreciate them more because they are not here. Okay.

I guess that you can think longingly of the idea of women if you don't see them very much, but they're so hostile to any kind of change that that really is what's wrong with them. So one of my favorite things, Susan Feluti goes to a gay club in Charleston and she asks around, have you guys ever dated cadets in the Citadel? And so this is what she says. She says, in two visits to the treehouse, I could only find two drag queens out of maybe a dozen who did not tell me of dating a cadet. And that was only because those two found the Citadel men too emotional. I bet they are. Oh my God. Because these are the guys who I imagine like five seconds in any sexual encounter, everything they've been repressing just comes spewing out of them.

I know. It's like these closeted little 19-year-olds in these super homophobic environments. I mean, little babies. What if there was a girl there? It would ruin everything. They would just cry whenever they saw her. But so it's very, this kind of rhetoric is very interesting. And a lot of people have pointed out that this is another component of sort of reactionary movements or of majoritarian movements who are afraid of their way of life being threatened. That the Citadel is very traditional and our way of life is the best. But also, it's so fragile that the existence of one woman would completely destroy it. This is one of my favorite quotes. It's like tone it fucking down. This is from Katherine Mangold's book. She's talking to a cadet just sort of wandering around the campus.

Lingering on the open quad, he fumbled for his words. If Shannon Faulkner came, he said, everything would change. It would be like a world without gardens, he observed dejectedly. And what? If women were cadets, then who would make things beautiful? Okay, you guys, it doesn't mean that every woman in the entire country has to come to your stupid school if you obviously don't have enough dorms for that. This has to be one of the cadets that dated a drag queen, but he was too emotional. Anyone can garden. You can garden, sweetie. Everyone who is speaking for this school that you have cited in this story just sounds like they're just going through it. Is it also like the idea that if she were able to withstand this

world, it would render it unspecial? Ooh, I hadn't thought about that, but yes. If they lose the sense of inherent superiority to most other human beings, then it will just ruin their lives. Yeah, yeah. Are you ready for Shannon to get to the Citadel? Yes. I have a picture for you. I assume they're going to give her a cute bob like an officer and a gentleman. It's not clear to me that I know what a bob is. Is that a bob? Yeah, I would describe that as a cute bob. Yeah, it's like chin length hair with a big barrette at the back, like a lane. So this is Shannon going to her first day of school. I see a young woman if I assume 18. She's 19 by this point. 19. She's got a rose pink t-shirt and white shorts, which is like a very Charlestonian look,

very high preppy. Yes. I'm getting like Clarice at Quantico vibes. Yes. And she's being walked in to the Citadel. It feels like a prison. It looks like they're going to let Jake Blues out. Oh. Do you like my fresh reference? I mean, it's interesting that you say prison because this is like a weird limbo two years for Shannon. Wow. In 1993, so seven months after she applies to the school originally, the case is winding its way through court. Again, I'm not going to get to all the different details of like the stays that are denied and the denies that are stayed and all that kind of stuff. A judge says the school has to let her in, but doesn't have to let her in to like the cadetery. Okay. They only have to let her into classes. They're like, if she doesn't

cadet, she has nothing to shower after, so we're safe. Yes. So Shannon can attend classes, but she can't do anything else. She can't be on the yearbook. She can't join any sports teams. She can't be in any clubs. There's parts of the campus that are only open to cadets, and she cannot go there. They're basically waiting for the state of South Carolina to propose an equivalent military education for women. But while that is being set up, there's no justification for keeping her out of the school. And she has to wear a big sign around her neck that says, shun. I mean, basically. Of course, everybody knows who she is. So the first day of school, she sits down in a biology class at 8am, and the other students in her row all move their seats. They're like, ick, a girl.

Yeah. There's this super fucked up thing where she gets an A in math, and they have a standing thing at the end of every semester that all of the students who get A's get invited to like a pizza party type of thing. And then when Shannon gets an A, they change the rules so that the pizza party is only open to people who are majoring in math. You know, a journalist interviews the head of the math department, and he basically says it would just be awkward if she was there. Because we all want to talk about how much we hate her. This is why social change is hard, is because the first person to do anything, like it fucking is awkward to have a woman at a party, but it's also pretty chicken shit to just like, sorry, we have to fuck her over because we don't

want it to be weird for an evening. I don't know, guys. Maybe it's good for you to learn how to behave when you're not in an attitude populated entirely by men, because you're going to have to do that like right after this. Yeah. It's also a weird year because, you know, her kind of main activity now is appearing at court stuff. I mean, being the plaintiff in one of these cases is really time consuming. She's living with one of her lawyers because he lives in Charleston and her family's back in Powdersville. And as we've talked about so many times on this show, people do not make money being part of these cases. Like there's no salary associated with spending all of your time in court, and so she works nights as a waitress at like a wings place. The one sort of point of light in

all of this is the first day of school, she gets flowers. From the last surviving garden on her. And there's a note with it that says, Shannon, all good wishes from the mother and sister of Citadel graduates, exclamation point. Oh, that's nice. I was really thinking that they were from Dolly Parton, but this is actually even better. So finally, in April of 1995, a court rules that the Citadel has to admit her as a full cadet. The path is open for her to attend the Citadel the following year, but then it takes a couple months for the Citadel to basically set up the logistics of having her live on campus because they've never had women living there before. And so they need like barracks and bathrooms and all this kind of stuff. They originally were going to have her

sleep in the infirmatory, like the sort of like nurse beds, but then there's no lock on the door. And her lawyers have to be like, are you kidding me? Like we're going to need some security precautions. Yeah, seriously. Get that woman behind like at least three dead bolts. So eventually they have to set up like panic buttons and federal marshals and security cameras. And all of that stuff takes time. So she just ends up attending the Citadel as a day student until the end of that school year. And so two things happen during this summer before she attends the Citadel for real. The first thing is that the media attention on her quadruples because there's this big controversy over whether or not she's going to shave her head.

Okay, I know. Why is this a story? Why is the national media necessary in this? And why does this cause an uptick? Like what's what? Tell me about this. My theory is there's a huge appetite for stories in which sort of social justice crusaders, members of minority groups overreact to small slights. The school makes all of the freshmen shave their heads and Shannon wants to go to the school. Therefore, Shannon should shave her head. Shannon is actually fine with this, but her lawyers they want to fight this because West Point, all of these other military schools have been admitting women since the 70s. They do not require women to shave their heads. They require women to just have hair that doesn't touch their collar. So her lawyers, I think somewhat

understandably are like you're clearly doing this to humiliate her. You're doing something that is totally out of pattern. So this then becomes this perfect narrative of women are oversensitive. And if you want to go to the school where you shave your head, why are you now complaining that they're making you shave your head? And so this launches a million articles that manage to overlook the sort of underlying issue should women be able to attend all male institutions and skip straight to women are being oversensitive and they're demanding this thing that is completely ridiculous. That's the way that it gets framed. Of course. But so a judge rules that Shannon has to shave her head. Wow. Fucking Janet Reno steps in at one point and writes a

letter and then the judge relents and says, okay, it's up to the school. We're just going to give the authority to the school. But then there's so much attention on the school at this point that they're like, we're not going to do it in the end. So in the end, they let her not shave her head like they just let her have the cute bob that you saw. They should get a camera and shave her head while she sings, I dreamed a dream. Yes. She also another reason this summer is so bad is that as she starts showing up in the press again and photos is that Shannon has visibly gained weight. She talks about, you know, these two years, she's not able to play sports. She's living with her fucking lawyer. Eventually,

it's not going well. And she moves back in with her parents. So she's commuting like these long distances. She's hella stressed out. She's working. She talks about all the stress eating. I mean, there are a lot of things that you can do as somebody in public life. You cannot be a woman who visibly gains weight. No, you can't. There start to be bumper stickers that say, save the males, shave the whale. What the fuck is wrong with people? Everything. And in the 90s, I think their guess was very little countervailing cultural voice in mainstream America on the side of like, let's not attack women for weight gain as if they are murderers. I know, you know.

The other thing that happens in this summer that I feel like we have to discuss, she is grocery shopping in Charleston and a man comes up behind her and puts his arm around her chest and his other hand over her mouth. And he whispers in her ear, I can't touch you while you're on that campus, but I can get to your parents. I know a place where I can watch them burn. And then he just like, he's gone as quickly as he came. Oh my God. I mean, between the sort of everything else going on and being in the press, I mean, she's just like on edge all the time. And also like, you know, the threat is so much that I also want to take a moment to emphasize that what that guy did is assault. Yes. Yeah.

And so on August 12th, 1995, she attends her first day as a cadet at the Citadel. And I'm going to send you a newspaper front page. Oh boy. Okay. So this is the Greenville news, Greenville, South Carolina, I assume. And the headline is she quits. Yeah. And then the subhead says something concerns cause Shannon Faulkner to leave Citadel. Yeah. And then the caption for the photo is Citadel cadets celebrate in the quadrangle of low barracks after Shannon Faulkner announced she was something. Yeah. Wow. Oh, and then there's okay, Simpson. I know. Kitty corner. Yeah. So after all of this, two and a half years long, legal battle, everything that she's been through up to this point, she only lasts one day. The first

day of school, she goes, there's like registration, things that she has to sign, she has to go to the bookstore and get books. There's like various logistical things that she has to do. And it's 102 degrees. There's like a lot of people on campus. You know, it's the first day of school, so there's lots of people milling about and you know, there's cameras there, there's press. It's just sort of like a sort of scene of general chaos for the first morning. At some point during this morning, she's in a crowd on this campus and she hears somebody whispering into her ear, the heat in Charleston makes some folks crazy. It can play tricks on your mind. And she recognizes the voice. It's the guy from the grocery store.

Yeah. Yeah. So who knows if like that's actually true, right? Like this could be something, you know, that she's imagining or not? I mean, to me, it's totally plausible that it's the same guy or if it's a different guy that it's like, in a way the same guy, because like any one of these men could like up and kill her or her parents. It really feels like at this point. Yeah. And I can see how she's just like fucking sick of this. Yeah. Jesus Christ, you know. And so sort of an hour later, she tries to have lunch and she ends up puking. She goes straight to the infirmary and she can't keep any food down for days. Like all she drinks is Gatorade. They have to help her to the bathroom. Like she can't move around on her own. It's sort of a mix of heat exhaustion

and just this explosion of stress. Yeah. It's basically her whole body is just shut down from everything building up over the last two years. She stays there, you know, Tuesday, it's Wednesday, it's Thursday. And this is the first week of school. And the whole kind of point of this first week is for everybody to bond with each other. There's all these like logistical rules. And here is her company that she's in and they're all doing all this stuff without her. And by the time Friday rolls around, she's just like, fuck it, I'm gonna leave. And she notifies the school officials and the VP of the school says, if you need to, like we know the press is around, there's a back door if you need to go out the back door. And she says, I'm going to walk out the way

I came in with my head held high. What Shannon says later, she's very consistent about this. She says she was becoming increasingly disillusioned with this entire process, but her lawyers needed her to keep going for the court case, right? Because you need the precedent. Right. Like Britney Spears in the 90s. Yes. She talks about the night before her first day of school. She gets in this like screaming match with the ACLU because they want to sell bumper stickers. Not necessarily her face on them, but like in some way alluding to her case. And she's like, you're getting all this fame. And like, what's happened to my life since the beginning of this case? Yeah. Her lawyers also understandably are like, this is about something bigger than

Shannon and we need to open the door for all women. And we need to push forward with this case. And so just the incentives of the plaintiffs in these cases and the incentives of the lawyers trying these cases are just completely out of whack with each other. I think our legal system is really weird and it really relies on spectacle. And I think that's bad. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I feel as if she has subjected herself to this hostility for this long to like succeed and like infiltrating this place. And now she has. And that was the goal. Yeah. And also, it's been two and a half years since she wrote that application. I mean, I keep thinking about, you know, where are you as a junior in college versus where you are as a freshman in college?

And you deserve to have a young adulthood. Yeah. And also, she's been at the school for two years and people have not been particularly welcoming to her. It's like, what is making up for all the awful stuff? Do they have like a really great art gallery or something? Rock climbing wall. You know, she has like a wonderful dance troupe. No. Shannon also says later that just she had no idea what she was getting into. Well, you never imagined too that like this thing is going to keep going for this long. And also that it's going to be this big either. Like when she filled out that trolley application, even when she filed a lawsuit, she never thought she was going to be

getting recognized at her job and, you know, death threats. This is just a lot to put on one person's shoulders, especially a 20 year old. Yeah. So we're going to watch a clip. Okay. Three, two, one, go. I talked to Shannon about her history making struggle. Do you feel that you were naive in your approach to this whole situation? Do you feel you were naive? I was very naive when I started this because I grew up in the believing in the American dream that I could do anything and be anything. And then I discovered this type of discrimination in 1993. And I didn't believe that it still. So you wanted to get in there because you wanted to fight the discrimination against women and wanted a good education for yourself. You knew

that you were being set up, so to speak, as this sort of bastion for women. I didn't realize that at the time. I do hindsight. But you knew that you fighting to get in, that was going to be a statement for yourself and you would be the first woman and all that comes along with that. Do you want me to say? I don't understand how you can sit there and tell America it never once dawned on you that you wouldn't be carrying the weight of what's going to come for every other woman after you. I don't, you know, I understand the stress to a degree. I'm a military wife, but I cannot believe in my heart of hearts that you truly wanted this as badly as you portrayed it to the media, that the Citadel was the only place for you when you can after two days

say, I quit. You would not stay and make it in the military is a teacher if you quit so quick easily. I believe that I handled everything to my best ability. The best of your ability at this time? At this time, because it is, it has taken two and a half years of hell of death threats of people vandalizing my parents home of people making threats against my parents about their jobs, about everything. I think I handled it just as good as I could have at this time at this time. What do you think? That was intense, man. Dude, that sucked. I know. I know. Oprah is not a great listener. It's not great. You're talking to Oprah and you're like, so this thing and she's like, so I'm going to summarize what you just said to me and then add in a bunch of stuff and act like

you said it. Is that right? You're like, not really. And she's like, no, but it is right, right? You're like, oh, and then someone from the audience insults you. This is like a little slice of what fucking Lexus Nexus was like, dude. Awful. This is the narrative that forms immediately afterwards is Shannon let the side down. Shannon is making all women look bad. Oh, fuck off. I know. Shannon is a bad feminist. She's a bad woman. Why couldn't she see it through? So she, so just like men and women both hate her. Yes. Women hate her because she's making us look bad in front of the men. Men are going to use this to hate us even more. And it's like, why not be mad at the men then? This is like that thing about like there was so much pressure on Sally Ride when she went into

space because if she didn't do a good job, then it was proof that women couldn't be in space. And it was like she needed to prove that women could do something. And it's like, I really blame the society that creates this false idea that like a woman needs to prove that all women are able to do this or that. And if she fails or chooses not to or whatever, then that just means that women are deprived of that right forever. I know. The New York Times publishes this entire article on basically how feminists feel weird about Shannon Faulkner quitting one of the opening paragraphs. It says in Chicago, Terry Hartfeld, their 24th day manager at Casey's Tavern said, this just leaves the impression of female hysteria of women saying, give me this,

give me this, and they can't take it. I'm tired of women like her representing my gender. She's at no point did she demand the right to represent her gender. Excuse me. Cokie Roberts on ABC says, she has done a great disservice. I mean, if you're going to be a pioneer, you got to get on the covered wagon and go across the country and be a pioneer. A lot of those people died, Cokie. Snake bites, cholera. So right after Shannon leaves the Citadel, one of the main explanations for why she quit was that she was too out of shape to do the physical training, which isn't true. There's a student quoted in Catherine Mangold's book. He says, the truth was right in front of everyone,

but nobody mentioned it because it didn't fit the popular theme. There is no doubt Shannon was overweight, but did anyone bother to investigate how many other knobs came to the Citadel overweight as well in that class? Yeah. Did anyone bother to find out that you can graduate from the Citadel and never meet those requirements? Did anyone bother to take notice that all she did that morning was just knob stuff at the bookstore? Certainly not. The truth would have detracted from the clarity of the story being put forth. Yeah. Somehow Shannon is the villain of all this rather than like the school being terrible and not allowing in women in the first place. Well, she's like she's she's leaving this place and is this really wounded animal. Yes.

And then, you know, to prove that they're still above her on this imaginary and sexist hierarchy, all these women who are trying to be not like other women are like... I know. It's not clear to me why it's so rare to find basic statements of solidarity from anybody. Yeah. Well, this is kind of a theme of the 90s, you know, and I think like one of the themes of Tanya Harding's life is that everything happened for her at exactly the wrong time. Like it was late enough that there was this mass media apparatus that could make absolute mincemeat of her entire life, but it was too early for there to be kind of voices questioning these mainstream assessments. Yeah. And also she wasn't really defended by mainstream feminism at the time because they're

what we were living in this time of backlash where I think you did see a lot of really horrible takes by women about maligned women in the news that were like, well, she just like, I'm not like her. We're not like her. Don't judge us based on her. Yeah. Yeah. I also think that there's something in the media too where I think men were also very terrible to her, but like that's not as interesting of a story for the media. That's true. Yeah. If you read the letters to the editor that were published in various newspapers that you come across in LexisNexis, it feels like 75 to 80% of them are from women. And it does feel like there's this sort of man bites dog element to like, look, how mean the women are to her. Well,

but maybe it also feels like less cruel in a way because like it feels like you're not showing someone punching down. Yeah. Yeah. This is a long quote, but I think very good. This is the end of Susan Feluti's article. This is the paradox that Shannon Faulkner was trying in her way to counter. Women are only allowed the solidarity and spree decor of the women's movement when they are defeated. A constant refrain of Ms. Faulkner's opponents was that she was a stalking horse for feminism. Each of these women was accused of being a pawn in some grand and malevolent conspiracy. They weren't. They fought alone, but let them fail or prove to be only human and the women's movement must take the hit. But as Shannon Faulkner stood before the press last week,

she shared with us her feminist epiphany, one that generally doesn't dawn on most women until much later in life. Making a lone woman a star is not the same as advancing women's equality. In fact, it is counterproductive. Faulkner said, I really hope that next year a whole group of women will be going in because maybe it would have been different if there had been other women with me. As I heard that remark, it occurred to me that she had received a citadel education after all. She had grasped the only aspect of the citadel teaching that really matters. There is strength in numbers. Solidarity counts. This is so important for the structure of social movements, right? Is that when somebody becomes a symbol of something, everything lives or dies

on the strength of that one symbol. It's like, well, you know, we thought women having equality to men was cool, but it turns out Shannon Faulkner got heatstroke. But this one lady fucked it up for everybody forever, so bye. Love it. And well, I feel like it's a story that allows you to respond to it and be like, I'm not a sexist, but this is going too far. Totally. And then to get your sexist yai-yas out without feeling like you are being sexist, which a lot of people need to do, apparently. Yes. And so I told you the story has a happy ending. You did. Almost exactly a year after Shannon drops out of the citadel, the Supreme Court strikes down sex discrimination. Ah. It's called United States versus Virginia,

and they talk about it as basically brown v. Board of Education for gender. So like, she won. Wow. Like the newsies. And yet she's still remembered as like pushy. Do not read the comments on the fucking clip that I sent you, by the way. Well, fuck everyone, honestly. The following year, there's four female cadets are admitted to the citadel. Two of them eventually drop out and sue the school for sexual harassment because of like the fucked up shit that happened to them. I'll bet they do. And this is dark. The first female graduate of the citadel, her name is Nancy Mace, and she's a Republican congresswoman now. And she like ran Donald Trump's campaign in South Carolina. There's a thing in 2018 where Shannon is invited to the citadels

campus to give a talk, and she refers to herself. She says like, in my heart, I will always consider myself a citadel alumni. Cool. Yes. And like, of course she does whatever. And then Nancy Mace writes on Facebook, like we don't valorize failure. Like I don't have anything to do with her. She shouldn't be talking like that. She didn't get the ring. And it's like Nancy, just be nice. I don't know. It bummed me out. You're like a man can using Facebook as a forum for pettiness. I can't. The citadel now has around 10% of admissions are women. Do they still have Hell Week? They do, but they call it challenge week now. They've like, they've softened everything.

They also, apparently there's a citadel float at the Charleston Gay Pride Parade every year. Like the school is sort of starting to thaw out. But in a way that's fostering Salmonella. Well, they're just doing this thing that institutions always do where they're like, well, obviously it's good to have women here, obviously. And it's like, this is what you fought against for three years and $20 million. Indifference to history means indifference to whose fault things are. I know. Also, like people's agency is really often conflated with their lawyers. And that's a real highlight of these media fracasi also. I know. It's like these debates

leave this residue. We remember Shannon Faulkner as pushy and oversensitive and she didn't want to shave her head. We remember all this stuff, but then we forget the fact that she was fucking correct. And the school is now saying that that was the right decision. And history and the law have proven her right and yet robbed her of credit for any of it. Right. And so another happy ending to the story is like Shannon is fine. So she ended up transferring to other colleges and graduating on time. There's an author named Pat Conroy who wrote a bunch of really famous novels, including The Prince of Tides, who is a Citadel graduate and he quietly paid for Shannon's education.

Send people flowers and pay for their college. This is like true allyship. Yeah. And she's now a seventh grade English teacher at a middle school in Greenville, South Carolina. Cool. She seems happy. She does these sort of where they now interviews. She talked to Oprah again a couple years later and she talks about how it's frustrating how she's been erased because people only remember the one week that she was at the Citadel. They don't remember the two and a half years of her life that she spent at the Citadel and in court. And so I want to end with a Shannon quote. This is from an interview that she gives to the AP in 2018. They're asking her about sort of her legacy and how she feels about the fact that the Citadel

now has women going there. Shannon says, every girl who walks in there, whether she stays for one day or all four years, she has won. I love Shannon. I know. I'm happy that I learned about this just for the sake of learning about it. And I also feel like it's a great object lesson in like, if you're forcing someone to do something for the first time all by themselves, then like, think about why perhaps you might be attempting to doom her to failure through the circumstances you're asking her to succeed under. Yes. And we don't like people that are seen to be pushing. So the nineties were bad and people who pay for other people's college are dope. Yeah. That's the moral. Pay for some college. Just a little slice of college debt, perhaps,

if you can. Any woman who has been made fun of on a bumper sticker, those are the people who pay for the college.