Military Expert: USAF Academy Should Ditch PC Gender-Blind Policies
by Chad Groening
November 2, 2004
(AgapePress) - A U.S. Air Force officer, who once served on the faculty at the Air Force Academy, believes the Colorado Springs military institution needs to abandon the forced co-ed social environment that was started there during the Clinton years.Former pilot Lieutenant Colonel Buzz Patterson (USAF Ret.) feels certain Clinton policies led very directly to the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Air Force Academy last year. Nearly 150 women came forward last year to say they had been assaulted by fellow cadets between 1993 and 2003.
The Air Force recently replaced the academy's Dean of Students with Brigadier General Dana Born, the first woman to hold that position at the school. She has pledged to focus on "changing the moral basis" of cadets and staff. However, Lt. Col. Patterson thinks the academy simply needs to realize that Bill Clinton is no longer the president. "If I was in charge," he says, "I would violate the Bill Clinton edict. I would separate the sexes, separate training, and have different standards -- which we have tried not to do, because it's politically incorrect."
Patterson hopes Born will be successful in creating a better atmosphere at the school, but the first step, he asserts, is abandoning the school's Clinton-era social engineering policies. He says he personally would "take away the forced social, co-ed environment and would have a female dorm and a male dorm."
The retired military officer feels it is not in the best interests of the nation or the cadets to bow to political correctness. "The Air Force Academy, like the Naval Academy and the military academy in West Point, is not a UCLA or a Stanford," he says. "We don't have to abide the social pressures of today's society. I think that we want to train and educate the best possible officers and give them the best possible start in their military careers."
And Patterson contends that other nations around the world have already seen the light where women in the military are concerned. For example, he notes, "the Israelis and the Germans have all come off of the forced gender-norm standards."
The Air Force veteran adds, "I don't see why America has to continue to insist on [the gender-norm standards policy] when much more liberal countries like Germany have come off of that, because it doesn't work. In fact we create more problems than we help."
Prior to his retirement in 2001, Patterson was an instructor at the Air Force Academy. He was responsible for more than a thousand Air Force cadets during a three-year stint at the military educational institution.
