THE LOUTS OF DISCIPLINE

By MARGARET CARLSON

After more than two years of court fights and $5 million in legal fees, what kind of feminist poops out after one little episode of heat exhaustion? To begin with, Shannon Faulkner makes an unlikely feminist. She applied to the Citadel after being surprised to learn that a state-supported school was still all male. While her cause was taken up by sympathetic lawyers, she never engendered the unstinting support of women's groups and her timing was off: the Republican revolution, cause fatigue, and a sense that women had been there and done that, all diminished her attraction.

Then there's the Citadel itself, a tin-pot, second-rate military academy whose unofficial motto is "2.0 and Go." It has few distinguished alumni among the third of its graduates who go into the military (most grads become kick-butt insurance agents and stockbrokers). While the Citadel might not have been a worthy target, Faulkner was nonetheless, as its first female, required to be Uberwoman-as fit as Arnold Schwarzenegger, as bald as Sinead O'Connor and as beautiful as Michelle Pfeiffer. Instead Faulkner was a little bit dumpy, a little bit plain and a little bit whiny (she fought not to have her head shaved). She often looks as if she's pouting when protocol requires that she smile through the insults and be inured to ostracism (a cadet who shook her hand last year was ridiculed mercilessly). She was isolated on campus, guarded by federal marshals after she received death threats. The administration was openly hostile, due back in court on Nov. 6 in another effort to expel her. At the orientation party, Faulkner and her parents stood alone.

By contrast, when women entered the more prestigious service academies in the mid-'70s, there was an effort made to ease their way. The first classes were substantial (119 women started at West Point in 1976), and standards were quietly made equivalent without being the same (hair could be cut to collar length, 18 push-ups in two minutes instead of some 40). Female officers now routinely graduate with distinction. In 1995, Rebecca Marier beat out 988 fellow cadets to graduate first at West Point.

But women should not be too quick to abandon Faulkner because she is not the perfect poster-cadet, or because misogyny is ebbing, or because the work of integrating all-male institutions is over. At the Air Force Academy, cadet Elizabeth Saum, a champion diver and straight-A student, was forced to take medical leave after playing the POW in a survival-training course. Saum says she was confined with a hood over her head and no food or sleep for two days, splattered with urine, and climbed on by a male cadet who forced her knees apart and simulated raping her. She sued the Air Force in May.

Military psychologist Dan Landis says, "There are all kinds of macho traditions that have grown up at the Citadel whose rationales have long been forgotten. They're useless." Indeed, the Citadel's ego-stripping program can be worse than useless. One Citadel graduate was among the four Rangers who froze to death in a training exercise in Florida this year. His instructors told him to continue to string a rope in 52-degree water, and he did so until he died. Pentagon statistics show that since 1989 seven soldiers have died in training for every one killed in combat.

At least 30 other cadets dropped out of the Citadel last week. Only Faulkner was treated with contempt. The cadet celebration after her tearful departure-streaming across campus in mock formation, a gloating, cheering mob-is evidence that she doesn't need the Citadel. But the Citadel surely needs her.

--With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer

With reporting by CHARLOTTE FALTERMAYER