Old Corps:  Something that in our day, the 1960’s, we looked up to and admired but which, with the passage of time, has somehow become a pejorative.  The uniforms have changed: first the silk full dress sashes were gone, then real sashes of any kind; then the blitzed brass; then the so-called grey nasties and the cotton uniform trousers and now, epilates sprout on sort of grey shirts, none of which are drastically starched, but perhaps that part is superficial.  The family mess is gone and that had a value none now understand, as is the strict daily formation schedule.  And today’s version of fatigues, without even spit shined boots, are the daily norm.  The honor system we revered, if not the words of the Honor Code, has also gone the way of the Dodo, as it has in all the senior military colleges being deemed much too inhumane and inflexible.

Standards have changed.  They are imposed from above rather than percolating from the corps and that is a shame.  We grew together as a corps and discarded grievous errors, like racism, because we were taught from within by people like Charley Foster that it was not only immoral and wrong, but stupid and wholly inconsistent with the Honor Code which was our core.  Hazing was abused in our time but served a purpose as those held in captivity during the stupid wars in Southeast Asia made clear.  And the rigors of our year-long fourth class system were not forced on us but demanded by us; we wanted the most profoundly challenging plebe system in the world.

Times have changed.  Today, October 11, 2025, we demolished a mediocre Division II school in football and the corps was proud.  I was ashamed.  As I wrote, I much preferred when we went against the very best and had our butts kicked to being bullies.  I would have been horrified had we lost today but, when did we set our standards that low?  And it was not a victory for the corps but one attained by de facto non-cadet mercenaries we sort of hire to make it seem as though we really compete.

I do take great pride in our academic achievements but believe that they could be attained, and even surpassed, if they were set in the context we treasured where we demanded to be challenged so that the impossible was merely challenging,  But those days are no longer with us and perhaps will never return.

Today’s Citadel is a fine institution but it’s not the institution many of us, most of us, hoped it would remain or, even more, the institution so many us believed it could become.  The excuses are myriad but they’re excuses and I believe in my heart of hearts that today’s corps of cadets, like ours, would prefer the environment we felt we had bequeathed it, and that they would make us proud.

I don’t know where the responsibility lies for the foregoing dilution in values and traditions.  It’s hard for me to accept that it lies in a four star Marine Corps general who is also a Citadel graduate, or in the members of the Board of Visitors we elect.  It was not sudden but rather, gradual, one change deemed insignificant after another until our beloved alma mater became something different.  Not totally different, the spirit of the corps of cadets remains, or so I believe.  But the leadership is something else.  As is the experience and inevitably the product

Somewhere in time and space generals Summerall and Clark spin in their graves as does the Boo, and as do many of our classmates and those who went before us.  And it seems there is little we can do but hope that this is a cyclical phenomenon and that sometimes soon, the pendulum will right itself.  But perhaps that hope needs a bit of help from those of us in a position to make a difference.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.