Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women

Laura Fairchild Brodie. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000, 350 pp.

Reviewed by Jamie W. Moore

People unfamiliar with military academies might well wonder what all the fuss was about. The core of the legal issue was certainly simple enough: could VMI, as a state-chartered, publicly financed college, continue to admit only men? In 1989 the U.S. Department of Justice sided with a complaint from an anonymous female high school student seeking admission to VMI. As the case moved forward in the courts, it became more public and emotional.

Similar passions were evident at the Citadel, which, like VMI, had an all-male cadet corps. Unlike VMI, the Citadel admitted students who were veterans, and they sat in classes with cadets. Since 1969, the institution had also gained considerable experience in dealing with men and women civilian students in its large evening under-graduate and graduate programs. In1992 three female navy veterans applied for admission to the daytime veterans’ program. When they were turned down, they filed a class-action suit in federal court. According to the Citadel’s board of visitors, the admission of female veterans would "destroy the diversity in higher education a single sex classroom provides" and "alter substantially the nature, character and effect of the Citadel." The board unilaterally and abruptly terminated the veterans’ program. That maneuver, one Citadel alumnus later noted, "totally disenfranchised all veterans, many of whom never graduated from any college due to time, travel scheduling problems, and cutoff dates for Veterans Administration benefits." It did not matter. For the fiercely committed loyalist, continuation of an all-male cadet corps trumped active-duty military service in the armed forces of the United States every time.

Emotions in Virginia were running high in January 1996 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 7 to 1 decision against VMI. Brodie guides the reader through the maze of organizational, physical, and emotional entanglements that in one way or another affected planning for coeducation at VMI, which Brodie describes as "a cloistered society, full of private rituals,[and] complex rules," with a long tradition of wariness toward outsiders.

The details are as complex as they are interesting, but the key structural problem was straightforward. On the one hand, there were internal and external pressures to make as few changes as possible, and if that meant few women would enroll or stay, so be it. The administration announced that women would be "assimilated" into the corps (a debated and carefully chosen word) and proclaimed that VMI’s traditions would not be changed. This position was consistent with VMI’s predilections and previous positions. In addition, it balanced the demands of powerful alumni associations that controlled all VMI funds that did not come from tuition or state or federal coffers, and it addressed the possibility that angry alumni would make VMI a private institution.

On the other hand, the negative publicity surrounding the Citadel’s handling of female student Shannon Faulkner’s admission and the later exit of two of the first four female cadets to enroll in the institution after they had been hazed guaranteed that, if VMI took the wrong step, public scrutiny would be unforgiving.

Central to the creed of VMI’s true believers is the uniqueness of the cadets’ four-year barracks life, described by VMI officials as a "leadership laboratory." The core of this experience is enduring the first year, which, as Brodie points out, is a time of "physical and psychological ‘rigors’ (some would say ‘hazing’) that had been abandoned at most of the nation’s coed military schools." A "mixture of bonding and bondage" known as the ratline, the first-year experience consists of "six to seven months of physical exertion, minimal sleep, and in-your-face harassment endured by new indoctrinees." The goal of new arrivals is to survive until spring "breakout," when they become full-fledged cadets. Breakout, Brodie explains, is "an annual ceremony in which rats graduate from the ratline by crawling across a muddy field and forming a human chain to scramble up a hill of mud, while upperclassmen alternate between physically tormenting them and helping them up."

The administration’s critical problem was that the impending arrival of women required it to deal with VMI’s "unwritten traditions." This meant cleaning up the language and activities of the barracks culture as it really existed, and squaring barracks life with the official and written regulations of cadet conduct. What was hazing and what was not had to be defined precisely. And VMI cadets, says Brodie, had "to question behaviors that they had long taken for granted, and to envision the standards of conduct that ideally should prevail at a military college."

In my long-ago first year of teaching at the Citadel, when I questioned the disconnect between the cultlike, militaristic aspects of cadet life I was seeing before me and my firsthand military experience as a draftee during the Korean War, I turned to a colleague, who pointed out the obvious. "Many colleges," he said, "have fraternities. This fraternity has a college." The image helps explain why classrooms and professors are noticeably absent from Brodie’s work. Aside from brief references to the faculty as a whole—more than 60 percent of the VMI faculty went on record as favoring the admission of women prior to the Supreme Court decision—the actions of the local AAUP chapter, and the remarks of one or two individuals, faculty rarely appear.

As Joseph Ellis and Robert Moore noted in their insightful study of West Point a quarter century ago, Schools for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms, a military academy is a hybrid, probably schizophrenic, institution that publicly claims, on the one hand, to develop character and professionalism through the rigors of a stressful environment and, on the other, to cultivate the mind through the intellectual activity of an undergraduate education. In the first year particularly, the goals are at cross purposes. At the academies, the military side usually dominates. Readers of The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy (a graduate of the Citadel) may recall that the only memorable faculty member at the fictional Carolina Military Institute is a professor of history bereft of professional ethics, who, prior to the publication of his history of the institute, excises the critical discovery of the existence of a sinister secret society at the demand of the general-president.

At VMI, the military comes first. As Brodie puts it in the riveting first sentence of her final chapter, "With the ratline behind them, the class of 2001 could focus on their academic work—a central, but unheralded, part of VMI life."

Brodie ends her narrative in 1998 but appends an epilogue that describes the 1998–99 academic year, which ended with VMI’s graduating its first women, transfer students from a military junior college. Her fine book explains how VMI, the first female cadets, and their male counterparts climbed a "hill of mud" to reach "breakout" on coeducation.

Jamie Moore is professor of history emeritus at the Citadel. He testified in court in favor of the admission of women in cases involving Shannon Faulkner and a group of female veterans.

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