Eleven years after the first woman enrolled at the Citadel, the military academy has released a survey indicating that almost 20 percent of female cadets have been sexually assaulted since they matriculated. According to an article in The Post and Courier, a newspaper in Charleston, S.C., the survey also found that about one in 25 male cadets have been the victims of sex assaults. The rates exceed those at the nation’s military-service academies.

Lt. Gen. John Rosa Jr., who came to the Citadel after serving as superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy (The Chronicle, June 21, 2005), told the Charleston newspaper that he had not commissioned the survey in response to a particular incident. Rather, he said, he wanted to determined how well the college was assimilating women after a decade of coeducation. General Rosa faced accusations at the Air Force Academy that its leaders were ignoring a widespread sexual-assault problem (The Chronicle, December 9, 2004).

A Citadel spokeswoman said the college would not try to identify and punish sexual assailants mentioned in the anonymous survey, but would require all cadets to take part in a new Values and Respect Program.

The first woman enrolled at the Citadel in 1995, after she sued and won a court order requiring her admission (The Chronicle, August 4, 1995). The college admitted its first class of four women in 1996, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all-male education at the Virginia Military Institute, like the Citadel a state-run academy (The Chronicle, July 12, 1996). Last year, when the survey was conducted, 118 of the Citadel’s 3,225 cadets were women.