Alyssa Schukar

That honor went to 22-year-old Sarah Zorn, now a second lieutenant in the Army, who was a junior at the time.

I began documenting Zorn, a business administration major from Florida, when she took command last May. I wanted to know: Could she embody true change at the Citadel, a state-supported military college with a long record of denying equal access to women?

I watched as she welcomed the incoming freshmen class, met weekly with administrators to plan events and address issues within the student body, and led her fellow students in physical training exercises. Her role during those exercises was not unlike her job as the leader of her peers: If a cadet stumbled, Zorn would lift them up. If another struggled, she would encourage them.

The job of top cadet is to tell subordinates — some 2,400 cadets — what to do. That included 837 freshmen recruits, called “knobs” because their shaved heads make them look like doorknobs. “You’re treated as an equal,” she said of her classmates and school leaders. “And you are expected to perform as an equal.”

The South Carolina Legislature founded the Citadel in 1842. The college did not enroll a black student until 1966 — more than a decade after public schools were desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education. It took three more decades before undergraduate women were allowed. (Women were able to attend the graduate school.)

Shannon Faulkner became the first female cadet to attend the school, in 1995, after a two-year fight in court. She dropped out after the first week, citing exhaustion and emotional abuse. On campus, the cadets celebrated her departure.

Twenty-four years later, women now make up 10% of the Citadel student body and 25% of students are of color, according to the institution. Over the past year, the school saw a record number of female applicants — something the Citadel’s president, Gen. Glenn Walters, a retired Marine, attributed to Zorn.

“I’d love to see the population of women here go from 10% to 50%,” Zorn said.

When she applied for admission at the Citadel, she knew little about the legal battle that had forced the college to accept women. Her mother died when she was 16, and Zorn moved in with her aunt in South Carolina, where she joined her high school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program and eventually earned an Army scholarship. Her aunt’s family became like her own.

Six months before she started college classes, her aunt was diagnosed with an aggressive form of liver cancer. She died two days after Zorn moved to campus.

Zorn applied to become top cadet in her junior year. She said it was part of her mission to help to repair the reputation of the institution.

“We want to make sure that people are aware of what happened here at the Citadel,” she said. “So that we can understand and make sure we don’t repeat it.”

In March, she helped organized an event for students to talk openly about sexual assault. (The rate of sexual assault in the U.S. military increased 38% from 2016 to 2018, according to a recent Pentagon report.) She helped shape the policy overturning an age-old rule requiring freshmen women to cut their hair 3 inches or shorter.

“Subconsciously, somewhere in the deepest darkest layers of Citadel history, that was an underlying symbol of oppression of women on the Citadel campus,” she said.

She also pushed openly for the inclusion of women and minorities in leadership roles, often passing on opportunities to address the student body to her second in command, David Days.

“If we want the Citadel to stay relevant and if we want the Citadel to stay the best college, then we have to hear the voices of these minority groups,” she said.

This month, Zorn’s tenure came to an end. She graduated May 4, passing the regimental commander’s sword to her successor, Richard Snyder.

When asked how she felt that the role would return to a white man, she said: “I have complete faith, trust and confidence that he was picked because he is the right person for the job.” She will serve the next eight years in the Army as a field artillery officer.

At her graduation ceremony, she joined nearly 500 seniors walking in alphabetical order across a brightly lit stage to collect their diplomas.

In Citadel tradition, the last cadet to cross the stage — the graduate whose name falls last in the alphabet — gets to speak. Zorn stood at the podium and addressed her fellow graduates, smiling.

“We survived — female regimental commander and all,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e9a278fe-b697-3619-a09f-0d95fe39ff6e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/us/i-serve-as-a-stepping-stone.html">The New York Times</a>.

Sign of Change, and Tradition: A Year With the Citadel's First Female Commander

CHARLESTON, S.C. — For most of its 176-year history, the Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, did not admit undergraduate women. That changed in 1995 with a Supreme Court ruling. But it wasn’t until last year that the school appointed its first female regimental commander — in essence, the head of the student body who leads the corps’ five battalions and 21 companies.

Sign of change, and tradition: A year with the Citadel's first female commander

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Alyssa Schukar

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Sign of change, and tradition: A year with the Citadel's first female commander